Foss Spring 2012 BLSEH Teaching Philosophy

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The cornerstone of my approach to teaching literature is an acceptance of and emphasis upon openness and multiplicity. My predilection for the student-centered classroom grows directly out of my own experience as a student of literature. What always has invigorated my own studies is the richness of the text. I find the plethora of varied, often contradictory, interpretations intellectually stimulating and exciting, and I will attempt to pass that excitement along to you. I will try to demystify the idea that there is some sort of secret knowledge of literary texts that only I and others like me possess; instead, I will try to emphasize that there are many different approaches to literature, most as valid as the next. Together, I want us to build upon the basic skills of critical analysis you all already own (as evident in your talks with friends about movies, music, teachers, etc., during which you delineate your likes and dislikes) and we will aim to develop the particular sets of questions which will allow you to best appreciate your numerous options when it comes to literary interpretation.

A large part of what draws me to Percy Bysshe Shelley--my favorite poet and the focus of my dissertation--is his belief in and commitment to process and multiplicity as the wellspring of freedom, where the resulting emphasis upon openness is construed not as an abyss of meaninglessness but as the undetermined space out of which true creation is possible. I end my British Romantic Literature (ENGL 335B) syllabus with an invocation of this idea: I note that, according to Shelley, great art “is a fountain for ever [sic] overflowing with the waters of wisdom and delight; and after one person and one age has exhausted all its divine effluence which their peculiar relations enable them to share, another and yet another succeeds, and new relations are ever developed, the source of an unforeseen and an unconceived delight.” Then, in a playful but nonetheless sincere follow-up to this, I ask you to consider the course an invitation to get your feet wet in that fountain, maybe to splash around a bit, or even to go for a swim: “C’mon in,” I finish up with. “The water’s fine!”

Tilottama Rajan, one of the great contemporary scholars of Romanticism, has argued that in fact many Romantic writers understood the role of the reader along similar lines. That is, they not only believed that their audiences (both present and future) actively participated in the process of meaning-making initiated by a reading of their work but, further, they actually hoped to foster in those audiences an awareness of the reader’s role as a necessary supplement to the texts they had created, the full potential of which otherwise would not be realized. I have designed this course, British Literature Since 1800 (ENGL 382), and its major writing assignment so as explicitly to acknowledge your own collaborative role, as a student in this course, in the formation and presentation of whatever our collective understanding of BLSEH will be by the end of the semester.

Your wiki work associated with your Class Summary essay assignment will serve to reinforce your sense of yourself as a valued contributor to our collective experience of the course material. You all will take turns posting your essay-length summaries of one of our class meetings to a wiki notes repository/forum. There should be two different sets of formal “notes” for most meetings--and all of you have the option (for extra-credit class participation points) to respond to these summaries through more informal discussion tab contributions. In this way you will collaboratively construct both a multi-voiced narrative of our progress through our reading calendar.

But the real centerpiece of this particular course hopefully will be our class meetings themselves and the discussions you participate in on a weekly basis. A large part of what draws me to one of my other favorite writers, Oscar Wilde, is his aversion to the stasis of the status quo and his belief in the value of process and change. For Wilde, “Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards individualism.” He sees in this process, if not progress, then at least a potential safeguard against stagnancy.

Indeed, according to Gilbert, the fictional spokesperson Wilde creates as a mouthpiece for many of his aesthetic theories in his tour de force critical dialogue “The Critic as Artist,” “The true critic. . . . will realize himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own opinions. For what is mind but motion in the intellectual sphere? The essence of thought, as the essence of life, is growth.”

It is out of respect for this vision that I will strive to ensure our discussions are lively and entertaining but even more importantly challenging and intellectually stimulating. Ultimately, though, I will need your help, for much of the burden of eschewing stagnancy for growth in a student-centered classroom must lie with you the students, both individually and collectively. I am hoping you both will take responsibility for your own learning and further, will remain as much as possible in motion intellectually by being willing to test your own opinions (both those you come into the course with and those you begin to develop as you read what I think you will agree is a very exciting calendar of incredibly thought-provoking texts) and by being willing to assume fresh points of view, to ask provocative questions, and to feel comfortable with the possibility of changing, multiple, even (when productive) evasive answers to such questions.

For me, education should be all about process. Yes, you’ll need me to supply you with much content-based information, but I never want my classroom to be a place where you come to receive passive information transmissions. It is what you do with that informationyour process of engaging with the material--that is most important. Discussion, rather than lecture, is my primary method of delivery, precisely because I see it as the best means of fostering an environment in which process and multiplicity are encouraged (as well as an excellent means of honing one’s ability to think critically and to express oneself clearly and accurately). I offer a variety of discussion-based formats: instructor-led large group discussion, small group discussion, and Blackboard Forum discussion.

If any of this discussion is to be successful, you must believe that I value your personal opinions and that I value discussion which does not seek to close itself off by deducing or producing the correct answer. You must come to see that there are very few easy answers and that working to complicate rather than complete questions often times is more intellectually satisfying, if also more challenging. You must be free to disagree and you must be comfortable enough to chance a potentially off-the-wall idea even if you end up feeling a little foolish about it later, or as a class we may lose too many opportunities to move beyond answers one may simply memorize to a more complex consideration of multiple possibilities. You must be willing to explore questions without any pressure to decide upon final answers until later--sometimes as late as the final examination, or even beyond the end of the course.

One of the reasons this pedagogical emphasis has worked well for me is that my students know any ideas they offer will be treated with respect as long as they are sincerely trying their hand at our topic. They also know that I’m comfortable not having an immediate answer to all their questions of me. I stress to them that I am decidedly not a walking anthology or encyclopedia or computer, and so I don’t expect them to be either. I tell them that, for me, being a scholar is more about one’s interest in investigating complex questions in search of sophisticated answers and about one’s training in how best to proceed with such searches than it is about one’s ability to spit out memorized data on the spot. This of course does not mean they do not see me as an important resource, merely that they are used to having me respond to some of their queries with an, “I’m not sure; I’ll have to report back to you on that,” or, “That’s a great question; let’s all explore it further on our own and come prepared to talk about it next time.” It helps them come to see that no particular discussion must be over just because the class period with a particular text’s name listed on the calendar now has passed.

Because I truly enjoy the vast majority of the material I teach, and even more so because I also truly enjoy interacting with students in the classroom, I usually cannot help but have fun (well, on most days) while I’m teaching--and I think my sense of fun and enjoyment also has something to do with why the student-centered classroom works so well for me and my students. I want you to see me as a very approachable, non-intimidating professor; I want you to feel comfortable booing and hissing at my corny jokes and bad puns, or teasing me about my wardrobe (or lack thereof). At the same time, former students most definitely will assure you I am nonetheless a very demanding instructor who expects his classes to complete challenging readings (in terms of both content and length) and who is a fair but very rigorous evaluator of their work.

As I conclude this pedagogical reflection, I want to return to Shelley and Wilde. For Wilde, the great merit of art is that it is inherently a disruptive activity. As he writes in his essay “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” “Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of [hu]man[kind] to the level of a machine.” It is through the “disturbing and disintegrating force” of Art/Individualism that, according to Wilde, we may (even, must) realize beneficial social change. As he sees it, “Progress is the realization of Utopias.”

Thus, he acknowledges that his aesthetics/politics as “set forth” in his essay are “quite unpractical” and that they go “against human nature.” Significantly, however, he continues on to insist, “This is why it is worth carrying out, and that is why one proposes it. For what is a practical scheme? A practical scheme is either a scheme that is already in existence, or a scheme that that could be carried out under existing conditions. But it is exactly the existing conditions one objects to; and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.”

I am a teacher because I believe, with Wilde, that art (and the teaching of art) have the power to change the world.

Shelley’s most famous quotable quote is, of course, “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” He spends the majority of his aesthetic manifesto A Defence of Poetry (from which this quotation is taken) attempting to demonstrate “the effects of poets, in the large and true essence of the word, upon their own and all succeeding times”--and the fact that he includes in his broad conception of Poets “not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance and architecture and statuary and painting” but also “the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life and the teachers,” clearly establishes that his claims for Poetry (Art, including for teaching!) are to be understood as inextricable claims for its power to effect change not merely in the aesthetic arena but equally in the sociopolitical arena, not merely in theory (on the level of ideas) but equally in practice.

Indeed, his primary motivation in writing the Defence is to counter his society’s privileging of reason over and against imagination, in that “a cultivation [of reason] in a degree disproportioned to the presence of the creative faculty” ultimately only tends to exacerbate “the inequality of [hu]mankind.” I am a teacher because I believe, with Shelley, that art and (and the teaching or art) have the power to change the world.

Once the semester gets rolling, usually I do not find myself actually stopping to think on a daily basis about what it means for me to affirm as I do here that in my capacity as an English professor I am participating in the sort of (r)evolutionary process Wilde delineates above and thereby lay claim to Shelley’s title of “unacknowledged legislator of the World.” Yet even in my introductory literature classes—when in Global Issues in Literature I (until this past semester) might become quite passionate about how Andrée Chedid’s The Sixth Day testifies to the transformative power of human solidarity in the midst of potentially soul-numbing suffering, or when in The Art of Literature I might wax poetic about Adrienne Rich’s own Shelley-like defense of poetry in her essay collection, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (and even as I self-consciously joke to my students that they should imagine some stirring swell of music in the background as I work up to my concluding remarks for such a day)--they know that literature matters to me, they see that I think it should matter to them, and they respect and seem to enjoy that about me as a “professor” of literature.

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