$17.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-5603-7

Published: Spring 2005

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Copyright (c) 2005 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction

Welcome to your first year of teaching. This book will serve, I hope, as a travel guide to accompany you through the opportunities and quandaries that you'll experience as you launch your career. We will spend most of the time on the challenges that will occupy most of your time: developing and teaching your courses. But we'll also consider extracurricular matters that deal with how you relate to your students and colleagues.

I won't dictate "the right answers." Not only do teachers vary in their goals, styles, and values, but they also work in diverse contexts, ranging from three-hundred-person courses to ten-person seminars and from research universities to community colleges. So this book will describe a variety of approaches to expand your options.

Along the way I will cite empirical studies to help you weigh the advantages and disadvantages of various pedagogical strategies. While the research on human learning and teaching does not offer definitive "answers," it does provide useful perspectives. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Rest assured, though. You are not expected to become a cognitive psychologist. Rather, I address you as a reflective professional, someone who is able to think deeply about your teaching and talk about it conceptually with colleagues.

This is a short guidebook—suggestive rather than exhaustive. If you want to read more, consult the annotated bibliography. But I assume you have precious little time, even to read a book designed to help you improve your teaching and avoid wasting time. So each chapter will be not only succinct and practical, but encouraging as well as enjoyable.

I also want to relieve you of the burden of "getting it right" the first time. Even experienced professors need three run-throughs to fashion a course to their satisfaction. The first time is trial and error, when you discover what's possible and what's not. (Think back to the first drafts of your graduate school seminar papers.) The second time you teach the course, you avoid the initial errors and false turns (like writing the second draft of that seminar paper). Then—and only then—you can take the content for granted and step back to ponder the structure and process. So the third rendition of the course is what you dreamed of: coherent, well-paced, incisive. And even then, ideally you will never stop finding new angles and additions.

Does this mean you should resign yourself to two rounds of ineptitude? On the contrary. While the journey may be bumpy and erratic at times, you will have a special bond with your students because you, like them, will be taking the course for the first time. Together you'll contend with the excitement and unpredictability (and yes, anxiety) of learning.

This brings me to a fundamental pedagogical principle of the guidebook. When you teach, you are engaging in a relationship with your students. That's perhaps too obvious to mention. On the other hand, as you sit down to plan your course, you may become so enthralled with organizing the content that you forget about the 30 or 130 people who will be looking at you that first day. After spending so many years of apprenticeship, you are probably impatient to stand at the lectern. You envision provocative lectures and probing discussions of the monographs that inspired you. But the vast majority of undergraduates are not taking your course to become historians, psychologists, philosophers, or whatever you are. Some enjoy history as presented by the History Channel. Some expect Psych 101 to help them achieve self-fulfillment; others are required to take the course.

In this guidebook I will persistently remind you that teaching is a two-way process, what education scholars call "dialogic." An instructor talks, but what do his or her students hear and understand? Teaching is only as successful as the learning it produces. Indeed, the teaching/learning relationship is not simply dialogic, between professor and student, but polylogic, among students, too. They may learn from each other, or intimidate each other, but positively or negatively, tacitly or explicitly, they play their role in the pedagogical relationship. Together, students and professor interact with the other member of this process: namely, the subject matter.[1]

Please don't misread me. In emphasizing this interactive process, I am not implying that students' expectations and practices should determine your own. The purpose of teaching is not to satisfy consumers' wishes or to find the lowest common denominator. Because learning involves venturing beyond what one already knows and believes, an effective teacher takes students out of their "comfort zone." He or she challenges them with unsettling ideas, sets high standards, demands introspection and hard work—all the while, heeding how students are responding.

In this three-way relationship among themselves and with their subject matter, teacher and students aspire to create what one may call a learning environment. They collaborate on a quest in which they are propelled by curiosity, study evidence, react and discuss and interrogate, and finally arrive at various understandings. I recall, for example, one afternoon when the students in my freshman seminar were discussing André Malraux's novel, Man's Fate. After two intense hours I suggested a break. "Not yet," they protested. "First we have to figure out: what is man's fate?"

How does a teacher produce this kind of environment? You raise questions that you want to pursue, questions that you find intriguing, important, and beautiful. But as the following chapters will help you to accomplish, you need to frame those questions in ways that appeal not just to scholars, but to students who are newcomers to your field.

A metaphor will dramatize those abstractions and also define my principles. Teaching should not be like pitching a baseball toward a student in the batter's box to see whether he/she hits or strikes out. Ideally, a teacher organizes a game of Frisbee, inviting students to catch an idea and pass it on.[2]

For me, teaching at its best is a joyful kind of work. I want to help you have a similar experience.