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IN THE 2001 issue of Profession, the MLA’s Ad Hoc Committee on Teaching points “in the strongest terms [. . .] to the need to develop graduate education programs whose scholarly emphases are explicitly linked to teaching concerns in a range of instructional settings as well as in applications outside academia” (229). Furthermore, the committee frames its specific recommendations in this regard by emphasizing that “graduate education should demonstrate that teaching matters by offering courses in pedagogy, preparing students for a range of teaching situations, mentoring students, [and] providing models of reflective practice” (235). These recommendations highlight the increasingly urgent concern in the field to address obvious shortcomings in our conceptualization of graduate student preparation for the profession.
In this context, I want to consider some of the challenges to foreign language programs as they prepare graduate students for teaching and to offer some thoughts on how these challenges can be addressed. I focus on the interdependence of preparations for language teaching and literature teaching. I discuss, in particular, the departments’ role in developing graduate students’ advanced teaching abilities so that they can succeed in the current professional environment. I insist that there needs to be an integrated approach to graduate teaching education so that these students can contribute to the mission of the full range of the departments in which they will live out their professional lives. To separate the preparation for language teaching from that for literature teaching is, to say the least, to reproduce the destructive division that paralyzes the foreign language profession administratively and academically. This division must be overcome—and what better place to start than with the preparation of the next cohort of academic teachers, researchers, and leaders?
By highlighting the role of a foreign language department, I emphasize the need for a comprehensive model of graduate student preparation where the academic unit is the intellectual home of our graduate students’ education. This model moves away from privatized, monadic exercises in teaching and learning. Instead, it highlights collaboration and takes seriously the immediate professional environment and potentially rich intellectual community in which faculty members and graduate students live, that is, the department. This model fosters the common responsibility for all aspects of graduate student preparation shared by all members of the department. In doing so, it also stresses the importance of a departmental culture, of the common language a department can offer its members for discussing disciplinary intellectual issues, and of the professional behavior of graduate students’ professors. All these serve as models for graduate students to imagine their own roles and responsibilities as future professors and professionals.
The department is the proper place to address shared educational and intellectual goals for the program and to prepare future teachers. The essential aspect of a department is the educational program it can offer. In practical terms, it is the place where curricular discussions and faculty (and future faculty) development occur and where these discussions can be brought to bear on curricular issues. In my home department, this means that we continue to discuss and work on issues of second language acquisition, pedagogy, and a well-articulated curriculum that spans the full range of courses, from first semester to senior seminar. This is work that is shared among all members of the department, tenured, tenure-track, non-tenure-track, and graduate students, as equal participants in this continuing development effort. Mutually agreed-on educational goals provide the framework for this work.
Graduate students are socialized into this environment through a number of formal and informal activities. They enroll in a course on fundamental issues in SLA research, pedagogy, and teaching methodologies. In addition, they engage in extensive class observations, mentored teaching experiences, and continuing discussions and practical work on the departmental curriculum. It is the hands-on involvement with aspects of teaching, supported by a firm academic foundation in SLA, that strengthens the development of our students as teachers. Once the students teach, they are regularly visited by different members of the department, who provide written feedback and a structured follow-up discussion. They also continue in their own class observations throughout their careers and at different instructional levels. This procedure ensures that they continue to develop and grow as teachers. A second required research-oriented course on second language acquisition or applied linguistics reinforces the understanding of issues that can help them in making informed pedagogical decisions in the classroom. This additional training enlivens discussion of curricular goals and ways to achieve them at the regular full-department meetings and workshops dedicated to these efforts.
Having all members of the department participate in the discourses of teaching at all levels and not assigning sole responsibility for graduate student teaching development to one person (the language program coordinator or TA supervisor) sends a strong signal about the multiple professional responsibilities faculty members have within the department. By extension, these are the duties, also, of future faculty members, that is, graduate students.
By “advanced teaching abilities” I do not mean a particularly impressive bag of tricks. Nor do I suggest a naturalistic acquisition of teaching practices through observation alone and in particular through exposure to literature professors. Instead, I propose that graduate students need to be enabled to develop a comprehensive, self-reflective pedagogical stance that can draw on substantive—and not merely experiential—knowledge in pedagogy and language education. This real knowledge allows the teacher to make informed decisions in the particularity of the individual classroom, taking into consideration the overarching, institutionally specific educational goals. That is to say, such a preparation provides the tools for graduate students to make choices and gain a level of independence and freedom in their decision making because they have a sound understanding of what they are doing.
How can this goal be achieved in practical terms? Again, let me give you an example from our program at Georgetown University. I do this not because it is a model that fits all needs but rather because it is a way of illustrating and enticing further thinking that takes into account the specifics of local situations.
In our program, graduate students are able to assess their own teaching through a thorough understanding of applied linguistics and second-language education as they teach at different levels of the curriculum. This self-evaluation extends to their own learning experiences as students in graduate classes where the development of superior language abilities continues to be an important and acknowledged educational goal. By understanding the learning process itself, both in their education and in that of their students, graduate teachers become increasingly aware of their own stance as teachers. These reflective elements of their teaching and learning allow them to address appropriately student needs as they arise in their teaching practice. A teaching portfolio that includes documentation of teaching experiences as well as self-assessments of those experiences provides a record of such development. It is this sort of multilayered approach to teaching that encourages a considered outlook that realizes the much-talked-about goal of enabling lifelong learning—in the teachers and in their students. This seems particularly important for nonnative speakers among the graduate students (see Byrnes; Byrnes, Crane, and Sprang).
Furthermore, that the department has articulated educational goals for the overall curriculum and for each of its distinct levels allows graduate students to be much more aware of the desired long-term outcomes of their teaching. As graduate students learn to think through the connections among learning goals, materials, and teaching interventions, they develop their pedagogies and their own ability to teach. Developing such teaching awareness and abilities enables them to design upper-level courses, including upper-level literature and culture courses. These go through the same approval process as any other courses in the department. The departmental (electronic) library of constantly updated and expanded teaching resources from other courses provides further guidance as the graduate students develop their courses. (And they, in turn, make their materials available to others.) The overall goal is to foster strategies to enhance and develop the multiple literacies that are necessary for a university-level understanding of a foreign language, culture, and literature.
This kind of graduate teacher preparation shifts the emphasis from methodology with its implication of skill transfer to an intellectually rigorous, research-based understanding of pedagogies and issues in second language acquisition. It does not mold the students into ideological practitioners of a particular methodology or theory. Instead, it gives graduate students the tools to develop their own standpoint to achieve agreed-on educational goals with practices that are grounded in substantial knowledge of SLA research. They are further guided by their own increasingly elaborate teaching experiences and by the seasoned teachers in the department.
Participants in this comprehensive teacher preparation are motivated by the insight that separating literature teaching from “mere” language teaching—on both the undergraduate and the graduate level—is counterproductive and intellectually suspect. Such a separation would unwittingly reproduce a content-form dichotomy that finds its institutionalization in a departmental hierarchy of power based on those who primarily teach so-called language classes and those who teach so-called content classes. (In graduate departments, this division is usually coupled with a split between graduate teaching assistants and untenured professors on the one side and more senior, tenured professors on the other.) Comprehensive teacher preparation recognizes the need to teach students to attain a level of cultural and linguistic literacy that enables them to develop their own voice in the foreign language. In such an endeavor the aesthetic and creative text—with its performative aspects, its multiplicity of synchronically and diachronically complex discourses, and its authorial stances—has clear advantages over the language of communicative situations and information. Teaching students to develop multiple literacies develops their literary competence (see Byrnes and Kord for theoretical assumptions and some practical aspects). Empowering graduate students to teach ultimately at the level of professors requires close attention to a continuous development of their linguistics, literary, and cultural literacies in the foreign language. We cannot have capable college-level teachers (and researchers) who are illiterate beyond a merely receptive competence in the foreign language. At the same time, we need to be cognizant of the broad range of textual materials with which we engage in our field. Literary literacy, so to speak, has to enable graduate students to be competent and well-versed readers of culturally determined foreign language texts, whatever the genre. To achieve that goal, they need to have access to and be trained in what is teachable about literature—“above all,” as Michel Chaouli wrote in an evocative essay ”the variable conventions of rhetoric“ (15). This does not supplant the aesthetic education model of classical literary study but rather expands its basis significantly to include all areas of linguistic signification in the particular foreign language, reflecting also a tendency of modern literature to incorporate divergent disciplinary discourses.
Such an understanding locates the intellectual-cognitive substance of foreign language study as a discipline precisely in the foreignness and in the specificity of the (foreign) language. This substance is primarily located in the courses of language instruction where language instruction is understood as the teaching and study of the foreign language as it functions as a system that “do[es] things with words aesthetically, culturally, linguistically, and socially” (Swaffar 8), that is, as language in use. From that, the study of a foreign language can open up what Russell Berman called “an authentic gateway to other intellectual and literary traditions” (2), their appreciation and critical evaluation.
Our graduate students need to develop a strong basis for those aspects of literature that are teachable rather than for those that remain, for the most part, unteachable. It is improbable that the “vast unravelling” that true literature is—to cite John Ashbery’s phrase as used by Chaouli—can be taught in conceptual language. Such unravelling might even be an experience few students will have in our classes (though one hopes they will have it when reading during their studies). But that improbability does not mean that we should not prepare graduate students to be able to teach the unique aspects of literature. This uniqueness resides in the (foreign) language. A complex understanding of language—its generic, didactic, and performative qualities; its social implications; and its historical and aesthetic developments—can and needs to be an integral aspect of graduate education, with an emphasis on the specificity of the foreign language and the social and aesthetic practices that come with it. We will not achieve sound teaching of literature (either in the foreign language or in translation) without an erudite understanding of the language. For literature people (as opposed, e.g., to historians or philosophers), the language in its vast complexities and the texts that are constructed with it take by necessity precedence over other considerations such as philosophical implications, political aspects, and anthropological deductions. While there is certainly a place for people to function intelligently with translated texts, we have to insist on the most comprehensive understanding of the foreign texts in our graduate students and the ability to articulate complex ideas in an appropriately complex foreign discourse. Without this knowledge, upper-level teaching of substance is not possible—on the graduate or on the undergraduate level.
To argue that graduate students need to learn these things by themselves, without the help and support of the department and the attention of the professors, is to shy away from one of our basic responsibilities. Even if such behavior takes the benevolent form of sending students off to study abroad, it reveals a fundamental inability to address a foundational issue head on. We do need to take this responsibility seriously and address it as a serious intellectual challenge to ourselves and to our students. Continuing development of language abilities in our graduate students has to be fostered and become an integral part, that is, a deliberately taught part, of our graduate courses. To teach the teachable aspects of literature is, to a large extent, to teach the language forms that are literature and the analytical discourses that allow students to articulate ideas at a level of sufficient complexity for university-level persons. Our graduate students have to be immersed in these sorts of foreign language discourses—and we as professors have to provide the learning opportunities in our own graduate classrooms and not assign them to some other locale or person.
This responsibility also means taking the graduate students seriously as thinkers who are capable of complex linguistic understanding of the foreign texts. To insist, as is often done these days, that all discussion, writing, and even reading of primary sources in graduate classes be done in English because only this strategy will allow an adequate level of intellectual rigor is to enact the intellectual diminution of graduate students. Since they are, supposedly, unable to perform at the necessary level, professors, who can (supposedly) perform at that level, cement their superiority. It is time to ensure that graduate students are taken seriously as intellects and performers in the foreign language—and to support their development with a targeted and sustained emphasis on enhancing their linguistic abilities. The welcome broadening of our understanding of textuality over the past two decades also points to the need to ensure that the linguistic sophistication of our graduate students is of the highest order. This is certainly not the only area that needs attention. Given that it has for the most part been neglected and even discarded as pedestrian, it seems permissible to focus on it here and to insist that it presents the intellectual foundation of what we are doing.
Finally, I need to address how this comprehensive approach to teacher preparation links to teaching concerns in a range of instructional settings as well as applications outside academia. Some of the connections are self-evident. Elements of this education such as the research skills, the linguistic and cultural literacies, and the ability to frame individual projects in larger contexts can easily be transferred to other, nonacademic working contexts. For academic employment, similar advantages hold. Most teaching positions are not located in the same type of research-oriented graduate departments in which graduate students get socialized (though some of these nongraduate departments are located in universities with large graduate components in their overall programs). Therefore, graduate students need to be equipped to respond productively to the variable needs of foreign language departments in a range of institutional environments. The comprehensive teacher preparation outlined here provides them with the conceptual tools and practical experience they will need to develop appropriate pedagogies and to design and guide curricula that address the distinctive educational missions and needs of different types of institutions. Enabling graduate students to think broadly in terms of curricular goals rather than in terms of individual courses embeds this responsiveness and flexibility in the academic core and programmatic realization of graduate education. By encouraging these qualities as features of a desirable professional personality, this preparation anchors the professional responsibility institutionally in the programs instead of shifting responsibility to the individual student.1
Let me also point toward a less obvious consequence of a focus on the interdependence of language and literary studies and teacher preparation. In many PhD departments, masters candidates are relegated to the status of second-class citizens where the MA is reserved for those who did not quite make it in the “real” (i.e., the PhD) program. In contrast, the comprehensive graduate student preparation allows us to pay close attention to educating MA students, who are the essential pool for school-teachers. Ensuring that the MA students have a firm knowledge of language learning and acquisition provides them with the knowledge not only to succeed in middle school or high school classrooms but also to continue in their own development of foreign literacy. As a profession, we need to address the needs of this group with the respect and care they deserve rather than sideline them as failed PhDs.
These issues place a heavy responsibility on graduate programs. They call for an open-minded approach to the varied career objectives of graduate students. Given the relatively small number of students in most of our programs, it might not be feasible to have all aspects of students’ career objectives covered in every program. Therefore, it seems imperative that graduate programs articulate their particular focus both institutionally and methodologically.
A graduate education and preparation for various career tracks that take their cues from such an understanding stands in sharp contrast to the sort of academic cloning energized by professorial narcissism that continues to be idealized by many as the most desirable form of graduate student preparation (see Gilman). It is precisely this sort of positioning of reinforced professorial (i.e., paternal) superiority that should be questioned. We should be taking seriously the obvious requirements of a graduate student population that is increasingly articulate about what it wants and what it needs. And we need to take seriously the intellectual foundation of what it is we are doing in foreign language departments in the United States.
Berman, Russell A. “Our Predicament, Our Prospects.” German Quarterly 73 (2000): 1–3.
Byrnes, Heidi. “Reconsidering Graduate Students’ Education as Teachers: It Takes a Department!” Modern Language Journal 85 (2001): 512–30.
Byrnes, Heidi, Cori Crane, and Katherine A. Sprang. “Nonnative Teachers Teaching at the Advanced Level: Challenges and Opportunities.” ADFL Bulletin 33.3 (2002): 25–34. [Show Article]
Byrnes, Heidi, and Susanne Kord. “Developing Literacy and Literary Competence: Challenges for FL Departments.” SLA and the Literature Classroom: Fostering Dialogues. Ed. Virginia Scott and Holly Tucker. Boston: Heinle, 2001. 35–74.
Chaouli, Michel. “A Vast Unravelling: What Do Literary Studies Teach?” Times Literary Supplement 26 Feb. 1999: 14–15.
Gilman, Sander L. “Learning a Foreign Language in a Monolingual World.” PMLA 115 (2000): 1032–40.
MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Teaching. “Final Report.” Profession 2001. New York: MLA, 2001. 225–38.
Pfeiffer, Peter C. “The Future of German: An Administrative Perspective.” Teaching German in America. Ed. George Peters. Cherry Hill: AATG, 2002. 393–406.
Swaffar, Janet. “The Case for Foreign Languages as a Discipline.” ADFL Bulletin 30.3 (1999): 6–12. [Show Article]
