Awards
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Mentoring
Philosophy of Kevis Goodman
English
In a famous defense of the
freedom of the press from licensing, a form of early modern censorship,
John Milton's revolutionary prose tract Areopagitica (1644) drew on a
metaphor from contemporary university pedagogy, a subject close to its
author's heart: "And how can a man teach with authority, which is
the life of teaching, how can he be a doctor in his book as he ought to
be, or else had better be silent, wheneas all he teaches, all he delivers,
is but under the correction of his patriarchal licenser to blot or alter?"
Its rhetoric rapidly exceeding its logic, Milton's prose soon explodes--"'I
hate a pupil teacher, I endure not an instructor that comes to me under
the wardship of an overseeing fist!'"--so much so that Areopagitica
soon needs to rein itself in, and return to the point: just how does a
man become a doctor in his book and teach with authority? The question
persists, remaining no less pressing when we modernize the site of instruction
and the gender of the pronouns.
Everything I do when I work
with my graduate student teaching colleagues is guided by the recognition--more
memory than philosophy--of the two-fold paradox of graduate student needs
and desires. GSIs require and merit real and not merely puppet-autonomy
in their classrooms; they also want and deserve guidance in the face of
variously challenging undergraduate teaching situations. They are still
(and who among us is not?) students of teaching, but they are never what
Milton calls mere "pupil teachers." Assuring them independence
and guidance at once is a delicate balance, but one as necessary as teaching
without pedantry. I do not know a secret recipe besides very hard work
(I have never been a believer in making teaching look easy; it isn't),
combined with genuine gratitude for their equally hard work and a strong
dose of self-mockery, equally heartfelt. Let me elaborate the hard work,
if not the self-mockery.
Since most of my work with
GSIs has so far occurred in the context of English 45A, a large gateway
course to the English major that employs up to eight T.A.s each semester,
I should begin by describing its special challenges. A survey of Medieval
and Renaissance English literature up to the late seventeenth century
(and, when I teach it, focused on Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales,
Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Milton's Paradise Lost),
45A has over the last decade or two earned the undeserved reputation of
an anathema: the service course most faculty hope not to teach; the prerequisite
for an English major that undergraduate majors dread taking, fearing the
difficulty of the language and the density of allusion, and suspecting
that the issues presented by these texts will be arcane, remote from their
own experiences. That reputation is indeed unmerited by this terrific
material, but it is a myth we have to contend with, especially since the
course is not an elective but required for each majoring student. Moreover
the pace is unrelenting: the class meets three times a week (two lectures,
offered by me, and one Friday section, led by the teaching assistants);
it requires three short papers, one midterm, one final, a frequent weekly
writing exercises.
In order the manage the course,
I hold "staff meetings" every week, after the second lecture
but before the section, for anywhere from 1-2 hours a meeting. A good
part of the time must be allotted to specific tasks: the drafting of paper
topics, the discussion of exams, the norming of both paper and exam grades,
the exchange of sample paper comments, and the discussion of what kinds
of comments are or are not effective. We also talk about how best to address
specific students needs, such as the considerable additional challenges
posed by middle or early modern English to ESL students, and we take up
all the unpredictable challenges that come our way each year. Probably
my favorite part of these meetings consists of the collective brainstorming
we do to gather possible emphases and test out possible plans for the
upcoming Friday section, a day or so away at any given staff meeting.
These become little seminars of sorts, in which I and those who have taught
the course before-and there are almost always some 45A veterans among
the GSIs staffing the course--offer strategies and recommend sites for
special focus. What is a good passage of text to focus a class's attention
on? And where might one hope to end up at the end of the hour? Some of
the best discussions I have had at Berkeley about the literature we teach
and love have occurred in these settings. At the same time, it has been
important for me, in keeping with the central paradox I discussed above,
to make clear that my suggestions are in almost every case just that;
each GSI must feel free to explore new directions within the limits of
the syllabus and the needs of the 33 students in each section. I have
found that newer GSIs, or those feeling a bit at sea, seize the suggestions
offered by me or their colleagues with relief; others know when they do
not have to. The camaraderie among our graduate students forged in the
act of teaching is strong.
One of my responsibilities
and my pleasures consists of visiting the several sections of the course,
which I do at least twice per section leader, more where necessary and
when possible in the course of a term with 15-16 Fridays. My visits are
then followed immediately by individual meetings with each section leader
in order to discuss the strengths of the hour and areas for further development,
where they exist. It has been important for me to remember that there
is no single model for good teaching; to pretend that there is courts
the peril that Milton (again in Areopagitica) derided as a "starch
conformity [such] as any January would freeze over." In short, I
myself have had great teachers who have been charismatic performers and
equally great ones who have been reticent and cautious--we all carry our
characters into the classroom. My task is accordingly to identify what
pedagogical character each GSI brings with him or her, to describe it
to us both (often revelatory), and having described it, to consider how
best to make it legible and helpful to the undergraduate students.
It is a tremendous honor to
be nominated for this award; indeed it feels almost a guilty one, since
it seems to me that everything I do ought be our job, in the best sense
of that word, and because the collaboration with teaching assistants has
been, since I first came to Berkeley in 1997, such a source of joy. The
quotidian life of leading a service course can become dreary; mine has
been greatly brightened by the intellectual exchange, inspired wit, and
laughter of GSI colleagues.
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