One of the pleasures of what's going to be another teaching-intensive semester is that I'll have many chances to talk about teaching with graduate students! It started already this week, with a lovely conversation with a graduate student who's created a new course for us on "Feminism and the Philosophy of Religion" (we've been meeting regularly about it over the last several months), and another, today, with the two graduate students TAing my lecture course "After Religion." This is like the fun pedagogy conversations that were a big part of this college's life back when we were a lot smaller and faculty hung out together more, but also different in enjoyable ways. It's all very real, since it's happening in real time in courses we both have investments in. Our topics this week were how to build community and establish expectations in the first weeks of a class - especially one starting on zoom - but broader issues came up too, like the place of students' personal experience in class discussions and coursework.
Discussing these issues this week made me realize how my own thinking about this has changed in my time at Lang. Trained in a particular approach to the academic study of religion I arrived with caveats and suspicions about the first-personal: whatever the intention of its giver, isn't it what Richard Rorty called a conversation-stopper? I still think it can be, but realized I have learned to work with and even welcome it. In most of my courses the first assignment is some kind of self-portrait. This is connected to that workshop I did at Teachers College on the importance of prior learning, but I think I've been learning it also from my students, many of whom are writers and artists whose efforts to define a voice or style are first-personal but in open, curious and even collaborative ways: conversation starters. And we work in seminars, after all, where the prior experience, distinctive susceptibilities and divergent projects of the participants are the recipe for truly generative learning community.
The grad students told me about their own undergradaute experiences, which are quite different! Two had been trained never to use the first-person, and the third studied at St. Johns, whose great books pedagogy discussions prohibit bringing in anything beyond the texts under discussion. Graduate studies are more like that, too. (I should make clear that the actual essays we're demanding of undergraduate students have of course to be properly researched and rigorously reasoned too!) But - with the help of their undergraduate students - I can sense them coming around already to the pedagogical possibilities of more personal ways of teaching and learning.
