📚 Boyce Teach and Talk

In November, the University of Cincinnati English Department held the first Boyce Teach and Talk, which celebrates the Department's Boyce Award winners by having them discuss their teaching. Below are my notes for the talk, some of which is adapted from my Teaching Profile as well as the talk I delivered last week at MMLA:

     When I think about what makes for great teaching, I’m usually at a bit of a loss on how to put it into words. Just last week, I presented at MMLA on a panel about film in the classroom. There, I spoke about teaching Jews in American Film, which is the course that the student who nominated me took. I talked about how, about six weeks into the semester, the Israel-Hamas conflict reignited on October 7th, and how I toiled for hours on how to address the event in class. In the presentation, I talked about what I thought was a failure on my part, how I inadequately floundered and never quite ended up addressing the event, and what eventually followed, head on, at least not in the way I wanted. But students thanked me by the end of the class for how I handled things. I couldn’t quite figure out what I did when I thought I hadn’t done anything. 

  What I realized while doing some research to prepare for the conference presentation was that the success came long before that moment. Each of my students’ thanks/commendations came in two halves: one about the war, and one about the classroom. When my first student told me that they appreciated that I had cultivated a space where their identity as Jewish was something they could express openly, they were thinking about the hate that had begun to spread around the globe in response to Israel’s actions but in reality, they meant that I had made sure that the classroom was set up to respect all of the students within it. When another told me that they were thankful to me for the way I “handled” the conflict, what they really meant was the second half of their statement: I made them feel as though their voice mattered and that they could express their feelings in class without shame.

I think that while simple this is exactly what makes for great teaching, especially in literature courses where discussion is the primary mode of learning in the classroom. I can spend hours honing my skills as a discussion leader, poring over the text for weeks in preparation for a single hour-long session, or I can even get a PhD (maybe I will someday). But none of those skills will matter if I walk into a classroom where my students don’t respect each other, and I don’t respect them. (Them respecting me is another story).

  While the Jews in American Film class is perhaps the most immediately culturally relevant example of this playing out in the classroom, it colors every interaction I have with students, no matter how small, no matter the type of class. One recurring example is talking about student writing. During my seven years in the composition classroom, I have been working on getting students more comfortable with turning in incomplete, informal, and unpolished writing. I once had a student tell me that they did not turn in their paper (or show up to class, I might add) that day because they “didn’t feel it was good enough for me to see it.” Rather than punish them, I met with them to go over the paper in my office, and though it was indeed a bit messy, I walked them through how to improve it while respecting the work they had done. I didn’t hold back, as that would be disrespectful in its own way, but I was always as generous and kind as I could be as a reader of their work.

  So, since respect is a bit simple of an answer, I would say my teaching philosophy builds on that to the extreme. I make sure that it’s not just something that happens in the classroom when we’re talking about difficult subjects, but it happens at every step, every level. In my comments, in our emails, in conversations in the halls, before and after class. I found out the other day that something like eight of my students in my class next semester are students I have had in the past or have this semester—if they keep wanting to come back, I must be doing something right!