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IN THINKING about the training of teachers during the past few years, I keep recalling (perhaps just to make myself feel better about the present state of affairs) my own preparation for the teaching of language and literature over forty years ago. Though flagrantly inadequate by today’s standards, it was probably typical of the 1950s. My course work in graduate school consisted of some ten very good literature classes, ranging in approach from textual analysis to literary history, and two linguistics courses: a historical introduction to Romance philology and a descriptive course in Old Spanish. Since I had near-native command of Spanish, I never took any Spanish language classes, though I completed second-year French and first-year German and Latin, which actually helped me teach Spanish later on. I was fortunate enough to be supported by a fellowship, and hence never held a teaching assistantship. You would consider me very unprepared for the position I got teaching full-time at a liberal arts college in 1957 (my assignment: a section of t-semester Spanish, two sections of third-semester Spanish, and an introductory course in Spanish literature).
I was amazingly lucky to have as my senior colleague Gustave Andrian, an excellent language teacher (Spanish and French) who was just then questioning the prevalent methods of handling second-year courses and trying out new approaches. I learned a tremendous amount by working with him to change those courses, eliminating dreary translation exercises, inventing strategies for developing discussion, learning about issues relating to the teaching of reading, raising issues of proficiency. Meanwhile I was also discovering all the challenges of being a faculty member at a small, selective liberal arts college—and finishing my doctoral dissertation.
Somehow I survived, improved as a teacher, moved to another liberal arts college where I again had superb senior colleagues (I still consider Helen Percas Ponseti and Beth Noble my mentors and academic mothers), and continued to grow as a language teacher while also conducting history and humanities courses (I loved chairing the freshman humanities program) and completing two large scholarly projects. In my eleventh year of full-time teaching, I accepted a professorship at a large research university, where I have been ever since.
I obviously would not recommend my kind of preparation (or lack thereof) for teaching to graduate students today; I also suspect that it simply could not occur. Almost very graduate program that I know offers mandatory training in the teaching of language, tied to the appointment as a teaching assistant. Students who obtain fellowships are almost always advised of the importance of holding teaching assistantships for a year or more and of taking the training offered in language teaching. Observation and evaluation of teaching assistants are done on a regular basis, and, in most institutions, graduate students who cannot do a good job as teachers are not allowed to go on to complete doctoral degrees. With the development of second language acquisition and applied linguistics as fields of study, most graduate faculties have at least a few excellent professionals who can teach and guide graduate assistants. The situation, then, seems much improved, and our doctoral institutions seem to be producing professionals who can enter teaching with adequate preparation. But there are some very serious problems still unaddressed, and there are a few ways in which the situation may in fact be worse than when I started teaching in 1957.
Of special concern to me today is an attitude I detect among many doctoral students in our program, an attitude that is, I suspect, fostered consciously or unconsciously by their teachers. These students have the clear goal of obtaining a position at a research institution where they will teach mainly literature and, perhaps, culture. Although they have been trained to teach language, they have little interest in teaching it for the rest of their careers. And they are not eager to cross disciplinary lines. Obtaining a position at a two- or four-year college rather than a graduate institution is not a desirable goal. These younger colleagues seem disconnected, in fact, from the demands of our current undergraduate students, who are interested in language and culture courses as preparation for business, journalism, life—and not for graduate studies in foreign literatures. The preparation of these newer colleagues of ours, in the words of Charles S. Adams, has been “based on an incorrect view of what [. . . they] would do as professionals” (164).
Maybe the years have dimmed and twisted my memory, but I am convinced that I and my contemporaries did not hold such attitudes, and approached all language and literature teaching and positions at four-year institutions as desirable goals. Though untrained, we at least entered the profession disposed to become trained, to train ourselves. Maybe this occurred because the profession was smaller; maybe it was because our teachers were less specialized than my current colleagues; maybe it was because the profession was less hierarchical. Maybe it was because the limited academic market of the 1960s, though no worse than the current one in French or German, did not follow a period of expansion of research institutions that granted prestige to advanced over earlier teaching. Maybe it was because we did not see language and literature (even literary theory) as separate and inimical disciplines. Maybe, also, it was because we did not see teaching as inferior to, or separate from, scholarly research. Today the establishment of which we form a part seems much more fragmented (see Hutcheon).
In any event, I feel that it is our duty, if we teach modern languages, literatures, and cultures at doctoral institutions, to counteract the attitude that only faculty positions at similar institutions constitute success. We can do so from various angles, in various ways. First of all, we should be or should become familiar with the nature, the challenges, and the advantages of teaching at various kinds of institutions, from two-year colleges to doctoral institutions. We should take advantage of any programs (such as those on preparing future faculty) that establish relations among different kinds of institutions, some of which programs include short-term faculty and teaching assistant exchanges. We should watch our doctoral students and pay attention to where they might best fit in the profession, instead of just assuming that the brightest belong, immediately, on research faculties. We have been discovering across all doctoral programs at my university that mentoring doctoral students is a very complex and important task, that it should range far beyond dissertation and research advising, and that it should include careful attention to multiple career choices. Interestingly enough, in my work as graduate dean, I have concluded that overall mentoring in all aspects of students’ lives and careers seems far more complete and successful in some areas of science than in the humanities. While this can be explained by the presence of research teams and other such factors, it is not a comforting discovery.
A number of institutions, including my own, have developed programs to help doctoral students become better teachers of literature and culture. This can be done through courses, often team-taught ones, on this topic, in which faculty members discuss goals, challenges, and pitfalls of teaching literature and culture. It can also be furthered by allowing advanced doctoral students to work as intern teachers in advanced courses offered by faculty members. Having had an intern about four times, I can testify that I learned as much as my graduate student colleagues—especially when I allowed them to plan and conduct classes.
Almost all doctoral departments now organize sessions to prepare doctoral students for the job market, including orientation sessions, mock interviews, discussions of ways of organizing vitas and letters; almost all counsel students in preparing papers for conferences, submitting or not submitting articles, and so on. When doing all this, however, we should be careful to keep a conscious or unconscious bias against nondoctoral granting institutions from creeping in and affecting student attitudes. Many of our colleagues who have never taught at liberal arts colleges can be guilty of such a bias: I was greeted with amazement when I told one preparatory session that some of the best teaching and some truly excellent research in modern Spanish poetry are being done at selective liberal arts colleges!
I suspect that increased demands on research and increased emphasis on publication in tenure decisions have had the unintended effect of separating teaching from scholarly activity, and of segregating the work of teachers at research institutions from that of colleagues at other colleges. If we focus on the spirit rather than on the letter of our regulations, this should not be the case. I strongly believe that good teaching in language, literature, and culture must be based on a scholarly attitude, on the drive to make new discoveries (see Debicki).
The prejudices in favor of research-centered careers and institutions that I noted above can produce some paradoxical effects and some very misguided attitudes on the part of job seekers. Trained to think of graduate departments and teaching colleges as two separate worlds, some candidates assume that significant research and new learning will only be important at the former—and express surprise when they discover that they will be expected to do scholarly work and grow intellectually at the latter.
The facilities and teaching responsibilities of faculty members at doctoral institutions will undoubtedly allow for more time for research and a larger volume of scholarly work; I would argue, however, that the discovery of new knowledge should underlie ýhe work of all postsecondary teachers. We do, as I argued in 1996, need to avoid past prejudices that have unfairly devalued some areas of study (be they research in second language acquisition or new directions in literary or cultural studies). And we must put aside the idea that assumes that faculty members who spend most of their time on specialized research and on graduate courses have higher-level careers than those who teach undergraduates.
Behind these concerns lies a danger that faculty members at doctoral institutions must avoid: that is, of wanting to clone themselves and of assuming that success for their students must entail a career similar to their own. As graduate dean, I have heard many students in a variety of disciplines complain that their mentors would consider them failures if they did not follow academic careers at research institutions. We must resist those tendencies with our students, as we do with our children. I must confess that I was very unsettled when my brilliant daughter, having graduated with honors in English from a major university, told me that she wanted to go into elementary school teaching and save future generations rather than, in her words, “become a pedant and type articles all night.” But I did know enough to affirm her choice—and all of us should do the same when our advisees choose to succeed in areas other than our own, be they undergraduate teaching or careers outside academe. The PhD, with its stress on critical thinking and research, can end up being wonderful preparation for many careers. (One of our students claims that it prepared her perfectly to be a lawyer and judge.)
I have also been speculating as to the degree to which the incredibly fast developments and changes in approaches to literature over the last thirty years or so may have negatively affected our students’ preparation for teaching careers. There are several ways in which they could have done so. For one, the attention given to literary theory and the rapid changes in complex theoretical postures can easily have driven both graduate faculty members and graduate students to increasingly narrow and specialized concerns, which affect graduate courses much more than undergraduate ones. In some cases, this attention may also have distanced literary study from other related disciplines, perhaps supporting the opinions held by our colleagues in other fields who criticize us as increasingly remote and esoteric.
Lest this sound excessively reactionary, let me indicate that issues of literary theory can and should contribute positively to the relevance of our work and to our interdisciplinary conversations. Having watched my own criticism evolve from its New Critical origins, to an increased attention to reader response, to a skeptical and deconstructive phase, and to a project in (what I hope is new) literary history, I know that my changes and discoveries were related to shifts in the world around me, as well as to constant dialogue with colleagues in other disciplines, with students at all levels, and with my own children. We can, I believe, relate our concerns with literary theory to our teaching and our preparation of teachers at all levels—but we must do so consciously. I feel that recent developments in cultural studies offer excellent opportunities for renewed and reinvigorated teaching of literature and culture to undergraduate majors, most of whom are not interested in becoming academics but who see the study of literature and culture as preparation for life in a global world.
I have avoided, so far, the issue of the academic marketplace. Yet it is a crucial one. The situation differs from language to language, as we all know: Spanish is doing relatively well, fueled by the large numbers of Spanish speakers in the United States and practical needs for the language (which often have little to do with interests in traditional literary study). French, German, and Russian currently face a much bleaker picture. As professionals in the larger field of language-literature-culture studies, we must of course find ways of working together rather than against each other to maintain the health of our larger profession. Though this topic may lie beyond the scope of my discussion, there are connections that I would like to stress. Cross-language and cross-literature programs, offered as key parts of an undergraduate liberal arts education, are desperately needed in our colleges and universities, and we are uniquely qualified to organize and offer them. (Currently, many are the property of philosophy and English departments.) We are not used to thinking that way: my colleagues in Spanish at Kansas were amazed, some offended, when on retirement from the graduate deanship I asked that two-thirds of my appointment be in the program Humanities and Western Civilization. (In a way, I am just coming back to earlier concerns.) I also think that if we join to advocate the importance of the study of various languages, literatures, cultures, and perspectives as part of general education, we will all improve our lot. And, taking a more political perspective, we can see that working together and asserting our common goal of introducing students to subjects that will broaden their global perspective will help us gain visibility and influence on our campuses.
Perhaps I have excessively emphasized my own path and career, which may have limited relevance to broader concerns. Please forgive me the grandfatherly perspective; I thought, as grandparents are wont to do, that I could offer some insights that come from many years of (in this case academic) life. As I do so, I would like to end on a positive note. I am absolutely convinced that the current graduate students whom I see and hear about are far sharper, far better prepared, far more able to succeed in the profession of language, literature, and culture teaching and scholarship than previous generations. If we can develop the ways of preparing, guiding, and mentoring them effectively, our profession will be better than ever.
Adams, Charles S. “The Real Small World(s).” PMLA 115 (2000): 161–65.
Debicki, Andrew P. “Learning Underlies Both Teaching and Scholarship.” ADFL Bulletin 27.3 (1996): 32–35. [Show Article]
Hutcheon, Linda. “Yet Another ‘Drama of Difference.’” MLA Newsletter 32.2 (2000): 3–4.
© 2001 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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