NK: Are there specific things— career milestones, events, people—you can remember now that helped you to become a good teacher, by which I mean a reflective one?
ES: I had very good luck during my career to have a lot of friends and a lot of colleagues who were really interested in teaching. The first teaching job I ever had was in a Quaker private school in Philadelphia—between my masters degree and my Ph.D.—and it was a great experience because Quaker education is extremely self-reflective. I was just a year out of college and I was teaching high school kids close to my own age. The most important thing for me was realizing how much I love teaching. It was good to have had that year before I actually started on the Ph.D., because I always had a sense of why I was in graduate school.
Then my first regular academic job was at Douglass College, as a part-time adjunct. At Douglass I had colleagues who encouraged me to finish my Ph.D., at a time when it seemed almost pointless: there were so few jobs for women and many universities didn’t hire women. Also, I had one remarkable colleague named Barrett Mandel who was very interested in the teaching process and he started a voluntary group for those of us who wanted to discuss teaching. He was brilliant and imaginative and very experimental, and emphasized the importance of teaching as an interactive process. That was a revelation to me. He shared his own techniques and methods—some of them as simple as having everybody sit in a circle, which at the time was quite a radical notion. I’ll never forget that he suggested ‘if classroom discussion really dies turn off all the lights’—
NK: What was that meant to do?
ES: Well, I guess to give everybody anonymity and security. You know, turn off the lights for a few minutes and you talk in the dark [laughter] which was not a device that I carried with me in my professional repertoire, [more laughter] but it was very liberating to consider it, because it was so focused on what makes students feel free to express themselves. And to think of yourself —as the teacher— not as the ‘bringer of information’ but as the facilitator of thinking and learning.
NK: So you carried that (facilitator) technique through your career?
ES: Yes, the group discussions were very inspiring, and made a huge difference to me… What happened at the same time was the explosion of the conference as a medium of professional exchange—the Small World phenomenon where you spent your time presenting papers and listening to other people’s papers. Although in terms of content I always thought that was an incredibly inefficient way of exchanging ideas, I realized very quickly that it was a kind of teaching, and an opportunity to watch other people teach. You can learn as much from the bad ones as the good ones. I would go with academic friends to hear famous literary scholars speak at conferences and we would always afterwards have a post-mortem about how it was done. Some very well-known critics were dreary speakers; others were brilliant and memorable orators and performers. I heard Houston Baker speak often enough to be able to observe what he did and learn from how he did it. I will never have his dramatic skills but I could at least aspire to them. More technically, Hazel Carby was the first academic I ever saw use video clips in a public lecture, and that gave me ideas for improving my undergraduate teaching.
I also taught in the summer at the School for Criticism and Theory. Stanley Fish was there as well, and he always asked questions after a public lecture that people really wanted the answer to. I decided to aim for a classroom atmosphere in which people ask the questions they really want answers to, not what they think are the smartest questions or the proper questions. I was emboldened by his example to be more direct and honest myself.
NK: One of the things that we talk about a lot here at the Subject Centre and one thing that is so important to the work that we do is the connection of research and teaching. Very early in Teaching Literature you state that you believe that the teaching versus research divide that characterizes English certainly, and I am sure the other humanities subjects as well, might be bridged by re-conceiving ‘our pedagogy to make it as intellectually challenging as our research.’ So one part of my question is what exactly did you have in mind in terms of making it more intellectually challenging and then the other part of my question is, prior to sitting down to write Teaching Literature were you conscious of connecting your teaching with your research?
ES: I always taught writers and ideas that I was working on and that’s the traditional sense in which people see the connection between teaching and research— you try out new ideas, you develop material. But when I wrote Teaching Literature, I was thinking of something else — that the teaching process itself is intellectually demanding and something you want to analyze and share with others.
NK: I don’t think the status has really shifted in terms of where pedagogic research exists in the minds of Literature and English department faculty. I was wondering if you can envision a time when that might shift, do you see that as a long way off or perhaps round the corner?
ES: I think it’s a way off, but it does seem to me that your teaching can become intellectually engaging and theoretically self-critical, something worth discussing and writing about. Many aspects of a professional identity formation besides research and publication need to be taken into account at a very early stage in postgraduate education, and make the difference between being an undergraduate reading literature and being a graduate student being trained to teach it. Pedagogy is one aspect that can be the subject of research as well as practice.
NK: And did you come to that quite late in your career or...?
ES: Yes. I had certainly thought about teaching a lot, but it was not until I was at Princeton that I really started to think about it urgently and concretely.
NK: What made it urgent?
ES: The teaching structure of Princeton is a very luxurious one where a professor has teaching assistants who lead small discussion groups for a large lecture course. Although the professor designs the course, chooses the reading, and delivers the lectures, the TAs work directly with the students and do much of the grading. When I moved to Princeton in 1984, I had a few teaching assistants who were really very inexperienced, and student evaluations at the end of the term would say that they liked the lectures but got very little from the discussions. I thought it was part of my job to monitor and oversee the entire course for students. For several years I met regularly with my TAs about what it was we wanted to accomplish in each course, and how we would work together in lecture and discussion to achieve our goals.
NK: Well, this leads me to your course, the graduate seminar you did on literary pedagogy. How did that course happen and I assume this was the first time such a course was given?
ES: Oh, absolutely. I was thinking about developing a new graduate seminar in the mid-1990s, and I realized it would be more useful to create a seminar on teaching. Princeton had given me an award called the Cotsen Teaching Fellowship, funded by an alumnus to encourage and support innovation in teaching, which provides an annual summer stipend, money to hire a graduate research assistant, and a fund to purchase books on your specialized topic for the library. I used it to research, plan, and set up a seminar on pedagogy, and to buy books about pedagogy for both the university and the department library. My colleagues in the English department were very sceptical at first about the intellectual content of such a seminar. So students took it as a non-credit course. At the end of each seminar, instead of a grade or a credit, I wrote quite detailed, lengthy letters about the students’ teaching for their dossiers. Perhaps getting that letter was an incentive for some students to take the seminar initially, but actually they were eager to learn more about how to teach.
Once the seminar became established and successful, I announced that I wasn’t going to teach it anymore, in order to have other English department faculty take over. I had thought all along that it was important that the seminar be taught in rotation by all faculty members because planning and leading such a course would require all professors to reflect critically on what they did in the classroom, and to investigate what was being written about the teaching of literature. As with any other subject, you learn a lot about pedagogy when you have to design a way to teach it.
NK: And is it still being taught?
ES: It is, yes. And I think it’s gone really well. I suspect though that as it has become more institutionalized within the department, advanced graduate students have been more and more called in to organize it. I’m not sure it has changed the department culture as much as it might have done, because “pedagogy” became another specialisation assigned to particular faculty members, so that most English department professors still don’t have to think about it. Similarly, Princeton also opened a Centre for Teaching and Learning at the end of the 1990s, but in 2003, when I retired, it had became more a service to graduate students than a network and resource for faculty.
NK: For students as opposed to faculty?
ES: Yes. Obviously, educating graduate students is an important way to change the future. But I think that the real challenge is also to reach faculty, because academic culture makes it embarrassing for professors to look for help or to change their teaching practices.
NK: Yes, and I am just thinking about our Renewals Conference (July 2007) coming up—there’s no real, just using that word— no real aspect of the profession that suggests we should renew ourselves as teachers.
ES: Exactly.
NK: That says we should go back and rethink…maybe we’ll update some readings in a course syllabus, but to really think through the structure and the apparatus of a course, we are not ever encouraged to do that.
ES: Change is risky for us all. Yet doctors and lawyers have to update their skills on a regular basis; they attend seminars and watch others demonstrate new techniques. I think more renewal should be available for faculty, not just in terms of new technology but also new modes and styles of communication. Moreover, we have nothing to lose by sharing teaching skills with each other; we are not in competition.
NK: Yes, I was reading that in your text—it’s different from research in that there’s no problem if we all do exactly what everyone else does, we don’t necessarily have to be original in our teaching.
ES: Oh, I shamelessly stole techniques from the best—to the advantage of my students.
NK: Another thing you wrote about in Teaching Literature was using new technology. You talk about it as one of the ways of breaking down how teaching (and learning) is a private, often isolated enterprise. Would you talk about which technologies put to what uses have or do you anticipate will improve the teaching of English? And which ones did you use?
ES: I thought the most exciting technology was using a computerised forum where the class could interact. I started using Blackboard at Princeton. Every tutorial class of 10-12 students had its own posting space, and I required each student in the precept to post a comment on the reading once a week. The postings were not graded, but they had to write at least once a week, before our tutorial meeting. Their writing and critical abilities improved enormously, and that was the point of the assignment.
NK: Did they improve because they were writing for their peers?
ES: Yes. They had to write often, and they were writing for their peers. Every week before the precept I read all of their postings. Sometimes I would print them out, but I always took some notes for myself, and when I went into the tutorial I would often begin by reading a little bit from one of their postings or commenting on them overall to kick off discussion. Over the semester I was able to focus on each one of them, and reinforce their writing by giving them some public attention and praise.
NK: I see what you’re saying, they’re actually learning about writing from each other.
ES: Yes, they’re learning from each other and they’re writing for each other, not for you as the teacher.
NK: So did you find that their writing then became less laboured and…?
ES: Less stilted; and week by week their comments would get longer. When it came to writing their formal papers, I was often able to suggest to them, ‘why don’t you take that interesting idea that you mentioned in your post and see if you can develop that further?’ Or I would say to them ‘what you’re writing on Blackboard is hilarious, but this paper is so stiff.’ … Of course the students tend to be very cynical about professors’ enthusiasms. ‘Oh you know Showalter loved these posts, but it was just another task…’ But they couldn’t see what I could see.
NK: Earlier you were talking about the first part of your career at Douglass where you had people who were very willing to and engaged you in talking about teaching— did you have colleagues at Princeton with whom you shared ideas about teaching?
ES: Not in the English Department, although there are many superb and dedicated teachers there. When I was working on Teaching Literature, I interviewed several of them, but those discussions never continued. I was more frustrated by the management of the Cotsen fellowship, which was a generous and enabling award. But the faculty who received it were not required or even invited to give a talk or share the results of their three-year fellowship with colleagues. Teaching awards can be a wonderful gift to individuals, but they should also be used for maximum impact on the community.
NK: Still, it’s very rare for somebody, like you, to speak as frankly about what you’ve done.
ES: My teaching was very much a work in progress, and I know that even by the time I retired I had a lot to learn.
Notes
