Wendy Hyman Statement of Teaching Philosophy
February 10, 2006
In the 1970s and 1980s, Short Hills, New Jersey was an insular bedroom community of Manhattan. Although it had no bookstore, it certainly teemed with hair salons and nail salons, upscale boutiques, and fine jewelers. Whatever its wealth of amenities for self-embellishment, it was not the ideal location for nurturing a young mind. By the time I left home for Simon‟s Rock Early College, I was desperate for intellectual stimulation, but I had no idea what living in a community of learners really meant. In the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains, in a college community with a mere 300 students, I soon found out. We argued about Plato‟s Symposium and Marx‟s Communist Manifesto; about Coming of Age in Samoa and To the Lighthouse; about deforestation and evolution. I cannot now recall all of the texts I encountered there for the first time. But what I can remember well was the delightful shock of being expected to have well-founded opinions about all of them. My professors, unlike any of the adults I had ever known before, were asking me some very serious questions. And I quickly realized that this required that I think some serious thoughts. The phenomenal respect implicit in such a demand is one of the greatest gifts a professor can give a student. Information itself can be had easily enough, between the covers of books or databases of search engines. But to ask the questions and create the environment that makes people want to bring their best selves to the table: this is a gift that only education can give. No matter what I am teaching, I begin with this goal of creating a classroom that is not merely student-centered, but deeply alive to the potential at the center of each student. I recognize that intellectual work is hard work, and that peeling away a lifetime‟s accretion of untested assumptions is sometimes uncomfortable. My continual aim is therefore to create a classroom environment where students come to value being active participants in the creation of knowledge, not passive consumers. My own cheerful delight in modeling the process of intellectual accountability; the high level of energy I try to maintain; and exercises that put the learning process in the hands of
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students: all encourage them not to coast on what they already think they know, but to do the braver thing of uncovering the depths of their own intellectual resources. I‟d like to think that in helping students bring forth their own potential, I serve the role of intellectual midwife. I have learned that it is crucial to initiate a collaborative atmosphere in the classroom as early in the semester as possible. This can present something of a challenge, since it is in these early class sessions where one must also lay down basic facts: biographical details about Shakespeare‟s life, background information on early modern England, and so forth. And while the mini-lecture is an efficient conveyor of information, I prefer when possible to seek alternative pedagogical strategies, those that generate knowledge dialectically rather than unilaterally. One example is an exercise I have developed to convey at least an impressionistic sense of early modern drama, and through it, the early modern era. Since most of the students signing up for Shakespeare or Renaissance Literature do not have a sense of even the basics (the rough dates of the Renaissance, who was on the throne, who any of Shakespeare‟s contemporaries were), there is a staggering amount of ground to cover. The scholar in me feels compelled somehow to itemize it all. And while I must put certain facts in students‟ hands early on, it is even more important to involve them, from the outset, in the exhilaration of discovery. With their curiosity piqued, I can then flesh out their knowledge base with more information as needed, over the course of the semester. By the second day of class, therefore, I present students with what I explain will be their first of many “close reading” exercises: the comparison and analysis of the list of dramatis personae from two different plays. The exercise is worth relating here in some detail. With little preamble, I first pass out the dramatis personae of the medieval play Everyman. “You are anthropologists from another planet,” I tell the class, “sent to interact with the foreign nation known as „Medieval England.‟ The only information you have been given in anticipation of your visit is the list of
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dramatis personae from this representative play. What kind of play do you think this is going to be? What kind of people wrote it? What does the world look like to them, and what do they value?” Their observations may be initially hesitant, but the collective spirit of the enterprise almost always leads to good insights. The students notice that characters are identified as embodiments of certain abstract virtues or vocational roles; that the protagonist (“Everyman”) is an allegorical figure for the universal; that the play emerges from a deeply Christian culture. They anticipate that the “action” of the play will involve formal interactions between these personified moral qualities, and extrapolate that this culture might not place a high value on “individuality” per se. Still, they recognize that with “Death,” “God,” and an “Angel” in the dramatis personae, the stakes of the drama are high. I then distribute the dramatis personae for a very different play: The Tragedy of Hamlet. The students immediately observe the astonishing change that has occurred in a little over a century. Just from the evidence of the dramatis personae, students extrapolate that this is a crowded world, an urban world, a militaristic world, and an international world. They recognize that since the characters on the dramatis personae are listed in order of their cultural rank, this is probably a deeply hierarchical society. Unlike Everyman, there is no “God” in the dramatis personae, but there is a Ghost, leading students to observe that religion has been replaced by an unsettling supernatural realm. They recognize that the presence of “players” (actors) in the dramatis personae means that the play implicitly comments on its own form, displaying a high degree of artistic self-consciousness. And it is clear from the play‟s title itself that the action and resolution are of profoundly different nature from Everyman. By the end of the discussion, which takes less than one full class session to complete, students have already taught themselves some of the important distinctions between Medieval and Renaissance drama, and, implicitly, between Medieval and Renaissance culture (subsequent
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handouts, exercises, and short lectures fill in the gaps). Moreover, they have already begun to think like literary critics, because they have been encouraged to make informed arguments about literature—not based on emotion or guesswork, but based on thoughtful analysis of textual information. Finally, they have gained confidence, because they have discovered that making sense of unfamiliar literature requires not arcane wisdom, but rather a set of tools that they themselves can acquire. Every day, it is my goal to put more of these tools in students‟ hands. Different classes, of course, require different teaching strategies. One of my intentions in my upper-level class, “The Poetry of Love and Seduction in the English Renaissance,” is to simultaneously teach poetry as poetry while never losing site of the particular socio-cultural environment that produced the uniquely edgy, intellectual, and erotic verse that is particular to the early modern era. But the focus is certainly text over context, driven by the necessity of demonstrating that the study of genre and form is not the arid fixation of scholars, but finally the only way to fully appreciate the vast resources of poetic language. Our unit on the evolution of the sonnet, for example, requires awareness of the profound emotional and aesthetic impact of many subtle formal elements: exemplified, for instance, by Shakespeare‟s haunting, truncated, 12 line sonnet on death, or Wilfred Owen‟s devastating 16 line re-writing of the Abraham and Isaac story, both of which we study in class. By modeling how revelation proceeds from the humble matter of observing technical details, I enable students to ask far more interesting questions of a poem than merely what it “means.” As a reflection of my confidence in each student‟s burgeoning intellectual life, I try always to employ those teaching strategies that result not in an inert transfer of information, but a mobilization of their own resources for critical thought. When students finally write their own sonnets at the conclusion of this unit, they internalize even further how deeply form creates—and imposes—meaning.
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I have always found that one of the rewards of teaching early modern literature is the pleasure of ushering students from intimidation to engagement. An array of strategies, planned and impromptu, ultimately serve this end. Sometimes I use the “foreignness” of the materials to great advantage, introducing students to cultural exotica like anamorphic paintings and antiquarian books. When students seem tentative, I employ in-class writing exercises to help them articulate their thoughts. I often enrich students‟ cultural and historical perspective by presenting slides of early modern paintings, handouts of relevant philosophical texts and classical sources, recordings of music that often accompanied early “lyric” poems, or lectures on relevant topics. I might stage debates in which students argue with each other, and then with themselves. And sometimes, I put aside visual and aural pedagogy altogether, in favor of something more kinesthetic; there are times when a lecture about the impoverished conditions of Roman plebians simply will not do, and the students must instead be the starving peasant or the threatened, irate nobleman. Whatever the strategy, my overall goals are consistent. Since so much of what I teach is interdisciplinary, temporally remote, or removed from its original context, my pleasant task is somehow to coax a symphony out of a seemingly inert score. Usually, this involves an array of strategies to familiarize the foreign (and, occasionally, to defamiliarize the ordinary). But beyond the specific content of any course I teach, my goal is to create readers, learners, writers, and thinkers who are curious about the world, who are willing to take intellectual risks, who have the skills to rise to a high level of critical analysis, and who actually enjoy themselves in the process. I like to believe that my own delight in being asked difficult questions—as salient for me now as in my college days—is contagious, and is indeed at the heart of a learning community. And so I ask my students the hard questions. And they ask them of me.