PEDAGOGY NIGHT AT SQUIRREL HILL

This conversation begins at a pub in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh- a pub that is widely visited by graduate students in the area who work on their writing projects, have tacos on Monday Taco nights and share joys and miseries of being at grad school. Last Friday, after a very tiring and yet joyful day of teach-in(more on this form of teach-in for a later post), I went to this pub only to bump into a friend. For the purpose of this post, let’s call him HD. Over the course of the night, after gulping down one Cosmopolitan and two Margaritas(it was especially great that night), I used one of my pet peeves on HD, “ I find teaching in the US easy and not challenging enough”. HD in his HD-esque way was quick to ask me, “What do you mean? Can you explain that a little more?” What followed thereafter was my passionate argument about the need for lecturing in a classroom setting and why an activity-driven model of teaching may not necessarily be the best one. I don’t remember how the rest of the night went except that at some point, I stressed on the need of being a good lecturer at the undergrad level and brought in bell Hooks in relation to cognitive training. (I recognize the paradox now) I was also probably talking of my experience of sitting at a lecture on Browning’s, “Andrea del Sarto” during my undergrad and that I still remember the lecture with all its precision. I also offered that I would take HD in a classroom at India where such lectures happen, should he choose to visit India again. (Okay, there’s a lot to unpack here and I will get to it soon)

The next afternoon when I woke up, my first impulse was to read the assigned reading, Elaine Showalter’s “Theories of Teaching Literature” for this week’s “Seminar in Pedagogy class”. As I was reading through the different models of teaching literature outlined in the chapter “Subject oriented”, “Teacher oriented” and “student oriented” learning, I was chuckling to myself because I felt that the conversation of the previous night was coming back to me. I paused, reflected and then tried making a connection among Showalter’s text, my two (very) different classroom experiences in Indian universities, grad student experience in the US and what I teach here as an instructor of record. I felt that it is only through writing this post, that I would be able to parse out some of my thinking.

My first three months of undergrad as an English Major in Presidency University, Kolkata India was strange. I loved the classes and felt that I have made the correct decision in coming to Presidency. The lectures were great. For all that jazz about teaching close reading in the US in a writing classroom, the way I have learnt how to read a text closely with all its nuances is through attending lectures about a specific text ( “Ode to the Nightingale”. One of my favorite profs spent an entire semester teaching one poem and that has actually taught me to read a text closely, with pleasure, with enchantment, with criticality). It was also refreshing to me that I could actually challenge a teacher about a specific way of reading, which was not always the case with my high school teaching(mostly, in high school, if I ever made a counter-point, the teacher almost always agreed to what I had said, instead of challenging my thinking further). The model, I argue was eclectic: there was a lot of focus on teaching content or the subject as Showalter would put it though there was space to ask questions/to openly challenge a reading. My brilliant peers(UG 2014 Presi, you are still my favorite interlocutors) agreed to disagree with each other. But what drove the content or the intense debate in the classroom was primarily a lecture-based model. At this point, I would go back to Showalter’s text to think through some of the key concepts that she mentions: teaching conflict in literature, which basically implies that teaching conflict would be aimed at showing the irreconcilable differences within the profession over ways in which literature can be taught and interpreted. She further mentions that she used this model in one of her classrooms with nine-preceptors offering nine different interpretations of a text and all that the students took away from that classroom was a spirit of hostility rather than hermeneutics of reading a text. Once again, I paused and started thinking of the experience of attending undergrad lectures on Frankenstein, where there were different paradigms of reading to which I was introduced. What I had taken away from those classes was that there are different models of reading a text, which often overlapped and I do not have to follow each of them while reading/writing/thinking. I walked away from those classes thinking that exposing first year undergrad literature majors to such a diverse set of interpretations and then letting them choose what suits their intellectual orientation is perhaps one of the most effective models of what it means to think generously with a text. What had gone wrong with Showalter’s classroom then? Was there not enough scaffolding or orienting the students to the fact that one reading is not necessarily opposed to each other? These are indeed speculative questions. Showalter also points out the need to have a balance between the micro and macro aspects of readings, which in my understanding points at the need to be teaching very specific kinds of reading, (for instance, drawing connections between disparate) with broader disciplinary questions in the field( Postcolonial Studies versus the Global Anglophone, in my area of study). Looking back at my undergraduate training from where I draw every day, I increasingly feel that I had a very good grasp over both the micro and macro aspects of a text, but had difficulty in developing my own style/voice. This could be due to the fact that the model of autonomous learning/ “student driven learning” was albeit different in my undergrad classroom: there were opportunities to ask questions, write what I am thinking and yet my undergrad papers had many block quotes in a 2500 words essay. I knew what to say but not always how to say it and therefore inevitably used block quotes as an entry point to make an argument. This was not a writing class but now that I am thinking about it perhaps it raises important pedagogical questions for me: How do you teach students to develop a writing voice in a literature classroom in India? For this lecturing may not be necessarily the best model. Do I teach content? Or do I suggest students to closely follow the style of one of their favorite writers of academic essays so that they eventually develop their voice? ( This model might have its fair share of criticisms but it has worked for me).

When I joined JU for my MA, there was a major shift in my classroom experiences. The courses offered were fantastic and it expanded my imagination in important ways. But..

*Most* of the classes were primarily lecture based classes but the difference was that the opportunity to ask questions inside the classroom or navigate a class according to the students’ readings was little(Speaking for the class, except for a few that I was in). I was not used to this and had difficulty because I am used to speaking in a classroom where the lectures are only a starting point for further conversation. Why would this happen to me? I loved lectures and there’s indeed value to it but why was I unsatisfied?

Besides, very few of my peers actually asked questions in class( This is not meant to show disrespect to my peers at the MA level but a point that I am just noting). I remember dropping out of a class in a week only because the professor who I am sure was thorough never made an eye contact with the students and shut down students very aggressively when they asked a legitimate question. ( I am sorry but I cant be in a classroom where I cant ask questions). Furthermore, till date I remember some of my peers almost rolling their eyes at me if I asked for any clarification or attempted to place the larger conversation within frameworks of more contemporary discussion. I learnt content but not always getting an opportunity to discuss what I want to took its toll over me. I started going to many conferences in a year (4 in a year) so that I could develop the ability to develop my own argument about a reading. It continued till a prof from my undergrad asked me to slow down and re-think what I am doing(Thank you for this!). This was another lecture-based model that did not work for me and I would argue that this has got to do with very high standards of what effective lecturing might look like set for me during my first one and half years of undergrad. I wanted to hear what my peers thought or how they would approach it differently but there was no space for it. (I don’t know if it counts but there have been days when I have not been able to hear what the prof said though I am sitting right at the first bench.)

I would be forever grateful to Nilanjana di’s MPhil core lit class or Rimi di’s “Locating Literatures” (I still have some suggestions, though) where it turned the tables on students in ways that challenged my thinking and made me more responsible as an autonomous learner. Going back to Showalter again, “: “Teaching effectiveness depends not on what the teacher does… but what the student does…In order to be effective teachers, we have to think about how students learn and how to help them learn” (36). This did wonders for me. But I am also very aware of my own privileges here. I theoretically agree with what Showalter says but here’s the caveat: considering a neoliberal model of education determines effectiveness in terms of service and output, what Showalter says is dangerous because it puts the commodity approach to education at its center- which I have great discomfort with. If teaching effectiveness has got to do with what students learn, who determines what should the students be learning? The university, the program, the teacher or the students themselves?

(By the way, HD, when I told you that night that I would take you to a literature classroom in India, I was thinking of a classroom in India, that was urban and may not necessarily encapsulate the challenges that teachers in non-metropole colleges encounter on an everyday basis. But my offer of taking you to a classrooms in India still stands)

Therefore, for me, teaching literature in a classroom in India, has got to do with embracing a ‘spectrum’ of not an either/or models of content/student/teacher centric but to carefully meld it according to the context and space in which I am teaching ( for instance, a student-centric literature class in India might be a disaster in a college where learners come from very marginalized backgrounds). Teaching literature is always contextual.

To be continued…