27, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 15-16
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What Our Mothers Might Have Told Us about Upper-Division Instruction
Nicolas Shumway
MY OLDER sister used to sing a song of uncertain provenance that tells of a woman sitting in a dark corner of a bar, where she “sheds another tear, in her bucket of beer.” When one onlooker asks another why the woman is so sad, the answer includes these words: “Her mother never told her, the things that a young girl should know.”
Our graduate students ten years from now could well make a similar charge against us, for although we tell them a great deal, we leave out many items of professional preparation. An uncharitable view of graduate faculty members hold that we often seem more concerned with self-replication than with preparing our students for the profession. Another view, no more charitable in its implications, holds that we are too caught up in the life of the mind and too disdainful of practical concerns to spend any time on them.
Our own experience should indicate what such practicalities might include. For example, how many of us emerged from graduate school with any sense of what different sorts of institutions might employ us? How many of us even today can distinguish between liberal arts colleges, four-year colleges, comprehensive universities, and research universities, much less discuss the challenges and opportunities each kind of institution might offer? How many of us had any preparation for our first job interviews? How often do we help students prepare résumés, write job letters, or produce adequate abstracts? How often do we discuss (except among ourselves) what promotion and tenure reviews are all about and how one might prepare for them? And even more important to our overall mission, how many of us felt even marginally prepared to teach the courses we were assigned in our first full-time appointment?
Ironically, graduate programs prepare students to teach courses at both ends of the academic spectrum, that is, beginning language courses, with which our students have a lot of experience as teaching assistants, and graduate courses closely related to their areas of specialization, which are the courses they most recently completed. But they will be singularly unprepared (as most of us were) to teach upper-division undergraduate courses, the courses designed to move students from the study of language to the study of literature, or, to put it more bluntly, the courses that produce majors and thereby affirm that a major in a foreign literature stands equal to any other major in a liberal arts curriculum.
That our students are unprepared to teach upper-division courses should come as no surprise. Virtually every graduate program includes some preparation for language instruction—if not a special course, at least a workshop or two. But I know of no department that offers instruction on how to teach an introductory course in civilization, an advanced grammar and composition course, or a literature survey course, even though such courses will almost certainly be assigned to our graduates in the early years of teaching—as they were assigned to us. It is entirely likely that our graduate students will learn through trial and error (just as we did) before becoming effective upper-division instructors and that in the meantime yet another generation of students will get less than the best.
I realized the gravity of this problem last year while completing my term as graduate adviser in Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas, Austin. Several graduate students, prompted by contacts with friends and former classmates now in their first full-time positions, asked me to set up a lecture series to address problems in teaching upper-division courses. I had never considered such an idea, but as it turned out, our department has enormous resources for such a series. Although the UT Spanish and Portuguese department is best known for its PhD programs, we also have a solid program for training majors, staffed by faculty members who have been teaching upper-division courses for years. Getting them to lecture on how they designed upper-division courses was merely a matter of asking. The series ultimately became a minicourse consisting of fourteen weekly hour-long lectures. The course was given on a credit or noncredit basis and offered only one credit-hour, partly because it required no outside preparation from the students but also because we wanted to reduce the tuition expense. In each session, a professor brought in copies of a syllabus, recommendations for textbooks, examples of tests and quizzes, and suggestions for grading.
The students and I expected these sessions to be nuts-and-bolts presentations, eminently useful but not terribly interesting. But we soon realized that questions pertinent to the highest level of literary research and criticism bore heavily on the design of these courses. For example, we discussed at length the advisability of using an anthology, the advantages and disadvantages of using excerpts rather than complete works, and the way to assess the quality of different anthologies. We considered in detail what texts might be most appropriates for students taking their first literature class and for courses with particular goals. We also pondered different approaches to testing and the relative merits of essay versus short-answer exams. We discussed at great length how upper-division courses should be organized, whether our organizational principles should include literary history, genres, or, in Spanish American literature, national literatures as opposed to transcontinental movements. As these explorations demonstrated, the debates about the literary canon that had so occupied us in graduate courses would directly affect the decisions our students would soon make regarding their own teaching. And we went round and round—to great advantage—on the question of how much literary theory to teach and whether that theory should include recent developments like genre criticism and queer theory.
Obviously, none of these questions were resolved. But what had begun as a simple teaching-methods course provided a basis for some of the most fascinating discussions of our students' graduate careers. The students emerged from these sessions with not only a sizable packet of syllabi and exams but also a greatly enhanced understanding of the options in designing upper-division courses as well as an awareness that the fun in teaching is not limited to the graduate seminar.
The discussions on teaching composition and advanced grammar, while less intense, were no less useful. Our department has a wonder faculty member who has given a great deal of thought to Spanish-language composition, not only as an exercise toward developing grammatical control, but also—and more important—as a means of teaching rhetorical strategies. He could thus offer the students as useful list of Spanish phrases that introduce anticipations, extensions, comparisons, contracts, contradictions, and conclusions. But he could also impress on our students that such devices were most useful as a way of constructing and tracking an argument. Not a few of our students exclaimed, “And why am I just learning this now!” He also brought in several exercises he made himself, along with a most useful guide to correcting a composition and recommending revisions.
Finally, I arranged for one of our teachers, who recently won a university teaching prize, to offer a list of suggestions on how to enhance discussion, deal with problem students, and create activities that get students to view the object of study as worthwhile in its own right, apart from degree and major requirements. We also learned that planning a good discussion can take as much preparation as a lecture (or more).
I certainly don't want to suggest that through this course we attained Nirvana here on the banks of the Colorado River in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. But I would offer this course as a model for similar courses, lecture series, or workshops. And I would emphasizes that what was conceived as a practical enterprise became a highly charged intellectual experience that produced superb discussions. But also not entirely trivial is that I can now sleep more soundly knowing we found a way to tell our students some of the things a young girl should know, that, whatever the provenance of my sister's song, it applies to UT less than it used to.
The author is Tomás Rivera Regents Professors of Spanish and Director, Institute of Latin American Studies, at the University of Texas, Austin. This article is based on his presentation at ADFL Seminar East, 15–17 June 1995, in Charleston, South Carolina.
© 1996 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 27, no. 3 (Spring 1996): 15-16 |
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