To teach, as I understand it, is to create a space where people learn. To that end, I am a facilitator. It is my responsibility to develop courses, syllabi, and assignments that empower students to become better readers of fiction, better writers of critical prose and stronger thinkers about the world. In my classes and individual work with students, we work together to practice the technical skills and investigate the historical context necessary to engage with the ongoing literary legacy of the modern and contemporary texts we read. Then I get out of the way of my students, giving them space them to make connections between the literary texts we read together, to collaborate with one another, and push each other to refine how and why they communicate what they’ve learned in their writing.
This collaborative mode is central to my day-to-day teaching practice. While teaching Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, I dedicated a full class day to tracing the connections between the characters in the novel, asking students to attune their thinking to how Ondaatje shifts narrative perspective depending on who the narration is being focused through. Students chose the character that most intrigued them and worked in groups to develop a personality sketch of their chosen character, and their relationship with each of the others. For 30 minutes, students worked diligently with their peers, finding and discussing textual evidence, and synthesizing it into a practiced presentation. Freeing them up to work in small groups also allowed me the opportunity to circulate and check in directly with students. After each group shared their character study with the rest of the class, we discussed what the collectively-gathered research told us about the nature of relationships in the novel. How does Ondaatje employ narrative to highlight the contingency and subjectivity of relationships? How does that connect to the broader themes of the novel – internationalism, globalism, the failure of cosmopolitanism in the face of war? All in all, I spoke to the full class for about five minutes. My students, on the other hand, were engaged deeply in the text for the full class period. The conclusions developed in that discussion proved lasting – about a third of the students went on to develop those ideas in their final paper for the course.
It is also essential to my philosophy of teaching that students know how to connect what they are learning in class to the world around them, both in the themes that literature reflects and in the ways of thinking that will help them be informed global citizens and consumers of media. In my Not-So-Ancient Aliens class, we traced the parallels between science-fiction depictions of aliens and how the media, purposely or inadvertently, perpetuates xenophobic imagery and myths about non-citizens. Throughout the semester, students collated examples from media they encountered outside of the course. Through ongoing blog posts and in-class discussions, we were able to trace the consequences on journalism and social analysis of the kinds of thinking science fiction engenders. In The Genre Turn, students pursued a similar line of inquiry, this time through the medium of genre more broadly. In their final portfolios for both courses, students reflected on this ongoing engagement, with one student writing that she “was shocked at how applicable what we were learning in class was to our current political atmosphere,” and another that “[w]orking on the portfolio and paying attention to the form of the media helped me think about how fiction influences how one sees the world.” Still another showed the practicable outcome of this latitudinal thinking, writing that while previously she had “read a text thinking [she] got the main message yet would come into class completely unaware of its deeper themes or messages,” she felt that the course had helped her with the technical skill of close reading, “because I had to take articles or videos that I would usually just scroll past or watch with dazed eyes and look into why this message is being sent, how it is being sent, who its targeted at and why it is targeted at those people. I would ask myself what’s at stake and what are the consequences?” For most of my students, this was their first college level literature course; nonetheless, by the end of the semester they articulated ongoing critical thinking and reading practices that they will be able to carry with them beyond the walls of the classroom.
In order for this kind of student-centric pedagogy to be effective, it is essential that students know exactly what they’re working towards and why. To that end, I craft specific and clear goals in all of my syllabi and rubrics, taking time in class to ensure that students understand what is expected of them at every stage. This effort has been particularly effective when it comes to grading and pushing students to revise – because students always receive clear and articulated feedback on each assignment, including specific steps for revision, end-of-semester evaluations reflect that every student agreed with the statements “I knew how to succeed in this course,” and “the overall course structure helped me learn.” I push students to develop early, low-stakes blog assignments into the central questions of their final papers, and we frequently take class time both for writing workshops and to revisit previous texts to mark how our thinking has developed. This iterative process is intentional; I align my assignments and maintain consistent expectations that build on one another as the semester progresses, which allows students to trace their own development over the duration of the course.
Throughout my time at Duke, my commitment to developing and improving my own pedagogy has taken me out of the standard seminar room. Much of my teaching has been enriched by my experiences working one-on-one with students. Having worked in Duke’s Thompson Writing Studio, I learned first-hand the value of providing students a non-evaluative space to work on their own writing. As a mentor to student-athletes, I have worked closely with students to help them develop the broader academic skills – time management, goal-setting, study habits – that often are deprioritized in individual classrooms but are just as essential to student success, and I’ve integrated some of those strategies into the planning of my own classes. My experience completing the Certificate of College Teaching has given me a framework for bringing together my varied pedagogic experiences and strengths into my classroom, which was further augmented by the opportunities provided by the program to observe the classrooms of colleagues in other departments. As a Fellow of Duke’s Preparing Future Faculty program, I worked closely with a peer mentor at NC State to broaden my own pedagogic questions: how are decisions about teaching brought up and out to the broader faculty level? How do departmental decisions affect the ability for individual teachers to be successful? How can effective interdisciplinary teaching engage students across majors, and what does it look like? What does teaching look like now, as budgets tighten and hybrid online models must be developed and revised rapidly in response to student needs?
Each student brings their own perspective to everything we read and every moment of class; my students teach each other and learn from each other. They lead high-level discussions of texts in my field of the Contemporary Anglophone novel. They talk to each other and think with each other about what it meant to live in a world full of other people. They investigate how literature might shape our ideas of the world, and how they each might present and write their own ideas to one another. As one student put it, “the most important thing I learned from this class was how to find relationships between things that I normally would think have no connection,” and that this challenge was in fact “refreshing.” As I’ve said, students are the most important people in the classroom because at its core, teaching is a fundamentally ethical act, a collision between people that, when done right, results in all of the perspectives in the classroom – including my own – becoming more informed, more thoughtful, and more nuanced in what they know and how they know the world. I agree, I find that refreshing as well.
Kevin Gallin, PhD 