Carla Sassi began her
academic career at the
University of Trento,
teaching English literature
and History of the English
language, and she is now
an associate professor
of literature at the
University of Verona.
She specialises in
Scottish literature and
Postcolonial Studies and has
lectured and published
widely in these fields.
Over her career, she has
also researched
nationalism and literature,
modern and contemporary
fiction , identity theories
and, more recently, law and
literature. Her first monograph,
Un’arancia Panlinguistica,
(1987) is a study of
Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange
and its Italian
translation. Her other
books include Imagined
Scotlands (2002),
a study on post-Union
Scottish literature, Why Scottish
Literature Matters (2005), and,
as a co-author,
Caribbean-Scottish Relations
(2007).
She has recently co-edited
Re-Visioning
Scotland: New Readings of the
Cultural Canon (2008).
Professor Carla Sassi and I met in Edinburgh last June. The setting was the David Hume tower, overlooking the University of Edinburgh’s campus. Warm and welcoming, Sassi exudes authority and style. As revealed in our interview, she combines genteel formality and discipline with a thoroughly modern approach to her scholarship and teaching. Over the course of the hour we spent together, bursts of laughter, sombre reflection and an admirable candidness all played a part.
We had both just attended the English Subject Centre event ‘Research into Teaching: making the links’ . Sassi had been on the programme and she spoke of how, growing up in Italy, her family moved about and, significantly, lived in communities that bordered other countries (Austria and Slovenia). Both the porousness of national borders and the ways in which cultures distinguished themselves influenced the way she came to understand the world, and this in turn fed her professional interests in borderlands.
Sassi’s research periodically brings her to Scotland, and she held a Royal Society of Edinburgh Visiting Research Fellowship in the Department of English Studies at the University of Stirling for six months in 2008. The chance to interview Sassi was a wonderful opportunity for the English Subject Centre to continue to promote the international dimensions of the study of English and, specifically, to explore the teaching of British literature in Europe. As Sassi had made clear at the event earlier in the day, nothing similar to a subject centre network exists in Italy nor is there systematic attention given to teacher training in higher education: ‘There is no such thing, no one will ever teach you how to teach in Italy, not at university level. We do discuss teaching with each other, of course, especially by age groups – so young or younger lecturers would meet and explain or discuss their problems they encounter. But there is no infrastructure. Targeted teaching problems would be discussed, but in a very sort of technical, aseptic way, in faculty meetings.’ It is perhaps not surprising, then, that teaching was not what drew Sassi into a career in academia.
The reluctant lecturer
‘As a university student I said, “I am not interested in teaching, I don’t want to be a teacher,” but, I think after five or six years of working as a lecturer (it was a quite painful process), then I started quite liking it. I think now it helps me to make sense of what I am doing. In the earlier days of my career, I was very much interested in researching, studying and writing, but I was not particularly happy at the idea of teaching (in Italy, it is 100–200 students at a time and it is really demanding, especially when you are inexperienced) ...’ Sassi paused here, clearly thinking back to how she negotiated her relative disinterest in teaching and the imperative to get on with it. ‘You should try stepping into a class of 200 students for the first time in your life!’ she continued, ‘I was 28 at the time and I mean it was a really frightening experience. I managed quite well in the end but certainly, psychologically, it was very demanding. Because Italian universities do not provide lecturers with any form of training or support, I tried to concentrate on my own experiences as a student. Basically, of course, as a student you know there are teachers who give you a lot and there are teachers who are failures, or just annoy you because they can’t teach properly because they don’t care or don’t prepare their lessons. So I certainly focused on the very good models and the very negative models to know what to do and know what not to do. Then again, I chose to concentrate very much on the students. I rely as much as possible on their response. I am sensitive, so I can see by the way they move and look if they are following, if they are interested, if they are fascinated, if they are terribly bored, and I still do this, after 20 years. Teaching is really based on interaction.’
I asked what shifted after those first painful years as a university lecturer.
‘Age,’ came the response. ‘Because I started at about 28 – I think that is definitely too young – it means that I was very close in age to my students. You need a little bit of distance, and I think the best possible age is probably when you are around 40, because you are distant enough but not too distant. It is, of course, important to be able to identify with them up to a certain extent – to understand what they think, they feel, and gradually I feel I am now becoming more distant, and the more distant you are, the less good the teacher you are going to be. This is what I feel. Experience and age are the factors which are very important.’
The seasoned educator
Sassi was inspired by her own university professors. In them she saw how the two main aspects of our work (research and teaching) coincided. ‘I can think of at least two professors whom I still admire and, unconsciously, I still refer to their integrity, not just their professional way of working. One of them was very strict, very formal, but gentlemanly, absolutely impeccable – just a wonderful teacher as well as an outstanding scholar. I still think of him as the perfect teacher, a model, definitely.’ Her commitment and sense of responsibility to her students is arresting, and reveals itself to be a consistent thread in the warp and weave of her successful career: if she is not teaching her students to the best of her abilities, she is ‘damaging them’ she says. One’s early twenties ‘is an important age in your life, and it is important to have good models.’
Amid the sound and fury of transition, employability, PG certs, benchmarks, assessment regimes, and all the other initiatives that currently dominate UK conversations about higher education, do we sometimes forget about the raw power of example lecturers provide their students? Sassi certainly has not: ‘I feel I have to do my best, even if sometimes I wish I could do something else, rather than step into that class.’ We both laugh at that, each of us recalling the occasions when dread, that pit in the stomach feeling, accompanies one’s entrance into the lecture theatre.
On a more serious note, Sassi adds that the other side of the story, at least in her part of the world, is that she ‘will never make a career out of being a good teacher. It doesn’t matter if you are a good teacher, in the end it’s the publications’. This hard truth resonates in Great Britain as well, I say, where many fear that metrics will usher in a two-tier system of research-only and teaching-only HEIs, while already some colleagues are given negligible amounts of time to effectively conduct research. However, if good teaching is its own reward in Italy, if the intricacies of teaching are not generally the subject of conversation there, and especially as teaching was not, initially, her favourite aspect of the job, how exactly did Sassi motivate herself to get to the top of her game? Surely it would have been easier, and widely acceptable, to reserve her energies for research? She answers forthrightly: ‘I am – how do you say? – Compulsive, in a certain sense. It is this sense of responsibility I have which I suppose is un-Italian in many ways,’ she laughs, ‘but I just feel like I can’t let them down, it wouldn’t be fair. And, if the class responds positively, if I see they are interested, it is rewarding. And if what I am doing makes sense on an intellectual level, it makes the doing easier.’
These days, Sassi does not step into the lecture hall without her PowerPoint slides. ‘PowerPoint is essential. How could I survive with 200 students without PowerPoint?! It is just very good for keeping the students attentive, and it just saves a lot of work and is much more efficient. I know they sometimes don’t have the books or forget the books, so I can put a passage on PowerPoint and I’ll say, “Okay, five minutes, read the passage and try and have a mini-discussion” (‘mini’ because it is impossible to have a proper discussion with such large numbers). Or I encourage them to work in buzz groups for 10–15 minutes on small tasks. These are techniques I have learned in this country, not in Italy. The other thing is that our system, for obvious reasons, does not encourage participation. So it takes me a couple of weeks to train them to come to me and realise they won’t say a stupid thing, to realise we are here to discuss …
I try to present topics in a way that I feel or imagine is interesting or approachable. I try to engage them and oblige them, so they will think and come back to me. I provoke them sometimes, I try to be provocative, I am very happy when someone comes back angry.’
Sassi is a little ‘old-school’ when it comes to the idea of using VLEs in the classroom: ‘the truth is we are so overwhelmed by the amount of work we have to do for classes we have little extra time for creative things. Certainly when I was younger I did a bit more. But I also realise that, without being cynical or dismissive of VLEs, what you do in the classroom is what really matters and you have to really concentrate on that. That is the moment of physical contact, no? When you motivate your students, encourage them to find out more, encourage them to read the book rather than just one page of each chapter, so that’s really where you play the game.’
Discipline and flourish
In addition to a different cultural attitude towards teaching, there are also significant differences in the way teaching is structured in Italy. For one thing, it is all lectures with no small group teaching at the undergraduate level. Essays are not the standard form of assessment and exams are mainly oral. And when Sassi says she relies on student reactions to her lectures, she means she relies on those students she can see in great big lecture halls, ‘usually the first three to five rows.’ When she asks questions during her lectures, when a brief discussion gets going, it is generated by the students who sit close to the front. ‘In my experience, those who sit there are usually better: very motivated. The farther you go up, god knows what happens in the back rows,’ she chuckles. She makes sure that she gives them one written assignment, described as a ‘questionnaire,’ which helps her to assess what the students are grasping and where she may need to switch approaches.
‘There are disadvantages, but there are advantages,’ Sassi states evenly. ‘If I compare Italian students with British students, or students from other countries where you have written tests and essays, our students are more used to speaking and preparing oral presentations than the others, and I think that is very good. British ERASMUS students at Italian universities are terrified of oral tests, and when they come to me I say, “I’ll just ask you a few questions; you read these books and we’ll discuss them,” and obviously they are not used to this. The fact that there is a bit of improvisation is also good for the student, you don’t really want to spoon feed them.’
At the undergraduate and postgraduate level, the Italian system is based on rigid authority which students are not encouraged to challenge. ‘You don’t debate, you just obey and study and read! Which is a hard discipline, but it is the way I grew up as a student and it means you learn to do things, to study, to find your way, to cope with things you do not like, and this is part of life, you have to do these things when you take a job, when you start as a lecturer, whatever you do in life, basically. The disadvantage of our system is that students are never taught to be fully independent, they are always dependent on their supervisor, or there is always a superior authority who tells them what to do, and I don’t like this.’ Another difference is that gaining the chance to pursue a PhD is incredibly competitive and requires, first of all, that one sit an exam. ‘I warn them,’ says Sassi, ‘that it is a very tough, competitive, ruthless system, and so you have to be prepared.’
There are several major changes afoot in Italian higher education: it has recently switched from four-year to three-year degrees and over to a credit system. Sassi laments the constraints the new structure places on pedagogy: ‘Quality wise, yes I am afraid it is worse, because the creativity has gone and it is just mini-courses to get a smattering of everything, basically. More or less like everywhere else in Europe, we are all undergoing a process of homogenisation, which is not a bad thing in itself, but it does have its disadvantages. The old system was a crazy system but one which, nonetheless, allowed for extra-curricular or optional activities, such as seminars or guest lectures on specialised topics. Both as a student and as a lecturer in that old system I had splendid opportunities for growing up, exploring, spreading out, it is undoubtedly sad that my students have been deprived of this.’ Sassi balances the loss of creativity in teaching at the undergraduate level with the opportunities for sophisticated intellectual journeys with her postgraduates, with whom she often shares her current research topics.
Teaching Scottish literature
From what I’ve read of her work, the idea of exploring and taking risks is an important aspect of Sassi’s acclaimed research on Scottish literature. She came across the subject by chance and found it fascinating, because it was ‘unmapped territory’ and ‘almost unheard of’ in Italy when she started in the 1980s. Initially, she explored the subject largely on her own, including travelling, studying and working in Scotland, and, in her words, ‘built my competence gradually as a “freelance”. Over several years I got to know and started to collaborate with many fellow Scottish studies specialists, both inside and outside Scotland. But, certainly, I found my way through Scottish literature in a very independent or perhaps personal kind of way, and I have been rewarded for that. Scottish literature is a new, exciting and fascinating field, I think I can claim it with some authority now, leaving a subjective narrative behind … it provides a fresh standpoint from which we can re-vision and problematise many important issues, from the literary canon to British imperialism, and even postcolonialism. In this sense, it is a challenging field of research but also a thought-provoking teaching subject. And I must say that, in the earlier part of my career, it was students who provided the most sensitive gauge to the interest and the relevance of the subject I was devoting myself to … their response was indeed a source of invaluable encouragement and even inspiration.’
There is no Chair of Scottish literature, as yet, in Italy, so Sassi teaches it as part of the ‘English literature’ curriculum. She likes to challenge the stereotypes about Scotland that her undergraduates bring into the classroom. ‘We all know about kilts and bagpipes and they expect that from me, no? Of course! And, usually, within two lessons I have dismantled any romantic notion of Scotland. And I make links with whatever is going on in Italy, tensions between regional/national identities are very strong in my country too, so I have a way of referring to all of these things and to engage their attention while encouraging them to re-think set beliefs and ideas.’
At the masters level (the generalist laurea specialistica only partially maps onto a UK masters degree), where her classes are far more manageable groups of 20, she discusses issues which are directly related to her research: ‘the masters students are very, very good and highly motivated, and sometimes I learn from them. They have never ever worked on Scottish literature before, so they have a very fresh approach. You realise that after 20 years you end up inheriting some of the certainties that go with your field. They also have a good general preparation and, because they study at least three modern literatures, including the Italian one, they adopt, quite spontaneously, a comparative approach. One of the things about our system which I like is that it is a generalist system. Whereas here, the Anglo-Saxon system is specialise, specialise, specialise. This has advantages because I see your PhD students are excellent in whatever they are doing, but then they lack articulation, if I may say so. In Italy, they never specialise. Even at a PhD level, Italian students do not focus exclusively on the subject of their dissertation, they participate in a doctorate ‘school,’ a federation of doctorates within the same subject area. The doctorate school in Human Studies would include history, philosophy, classical studies, modern languages and linguistics … So they certainly work very hard at being humanists … In a sense we still practice, anachronistically, the basic tenets of Renaissance Humanism – the notion that men should try to embrace all knowledge. It may be regarded as a superseded paradigm, but I do believe it still holds value in Human Studies.’
There are many more questions I wish to ask Professor Sassi, but I keep my promise and leave her after an hour, worried that she must be exhausted after such a long day spent engaging in English Subject Centre activities. As I head back to London, I am well aware that, once again, I have been privileged to delve, however briefly, into a colleague’s personal teaching history.
