Teaching Philosohy: Gregory Flaxman

from the Office of the Provost and the Center for Teaching and Learning 
at the University of Pennsylvania
 
As both a teacher and a student, my most satisfying experiences in the classroom have revolved around the powerful impression that, in the strange spell of a discussion or lecture, it is possible to see the world differently.  However briefly, I continue to believe that it is possible to evoke such uncanny episodes --- moments when we think outside our sphere of habits and rituals.  In this sense, my teaching philosophy can perhaps best be described as the teaching of philosophy, by which I mean the evocation of different styles of thinking, that allow us to re-consider our own largely unconscious relationship to the arts and, perhaps, the world at large.
 
Ironically, the task of describing my teaching philosophy demands something of this same defamiliarization, for the public conduct of any teacher is underwritten by a great many private decisions.  Let me say, at the outset, that I have been teaching regularly for the last five years, first at the University of Iowa, where I was a graduate student in Film Studies, and then at the University of Pennsylvania, where I have taught in Comparative Literature, English, and (again) Film Studies.  Nevertheless, I suspect that my philosophy was most profoundly shaped by the teaching adult education classes several years ago.  Because older students are sometimes years removed from school or, in some cases, have never come into contact with academic rigor at all, the temptation as a teacher is to soften the intellectual demands.  It is this general temptation that I have tried, in every class I have ever taught, to resist; rather, I assume (or choose to believe) that any student is capable of managing the most complex and difficult intellectual labor.  This could be taken to mean that I prefer not to "dumb down" material, but I tend to think that this presupposes a broader pedagogical theory that I will try, in what follows, to explain.

The best classes that I ever took as a student in the humanities were those in which teachers were not afraid to take responsibility for their materials.  Too often I found that the assigned readings were meant to speak for themselves, or to be explained by outside sources.  By contrast, I was thrilled to find professors who would undertake their own readings, which were inevitably more passionate and, perhaps more importantly, which empowered students to raise objections and to begin to read "for themselves".  To what degree can we expect to nurture critical skills in our students if we don't enter the class prepared to make determinations, to justify our judgements, to open ourselves in turn to our students' critiques?  In my own class, this philosophy translates into a number of concrete practices.
 
1)  I tend to formulate courses around what might be called a "conceptual tendency" --- not a thesis so much as a sense of direction or culmination.  Consider the film theory class I'm teaching this semester:  while the course is undoubtedly meant as an introduction to a field of study, I've tried to avoid the sense in which each new section (formalism, structuralism, feminism, etc.) constitutes simply another methodology.  Not only are these methodologies interrelated, not only do they critique one another, but they exist in a general trajectory that I have arranged and that I want my students to intuit, debate, even refute.  This practice works differently depending on the subject matter, but I have found, over the last few years, that two basic choices determine my teaching style.  On the one hand, I believe in using part of class time  to lecture, for to refuse to do as much, expecially in the context of teaching theory or philosophy, is to effectively abdicate responsibility.  On the other hand, I have tended to re-figure the role of student presentations.  Frequently such presentations only serve the purpose of assigning our pedagogical onus or taking up time, and so I have either eliminated them or, as I did last semester, orchestrated them more closely and emphasized their weight with respect to final grades.

2)  In all of my classes, I have resolved not to shy away from difficult material.  Professors and especially graduate students often tend to resist teaching difficult works or to read them indirectly, that is, through second-hand exegeses; by contrast, I'm convinced that students consistently rise to the level of the material, and that in so doing they become better readers and thinkers.  Last semester, for example, my modernism class began with Friedrich Nietzsche's immensely complex first book, The Birth of Tragedy,  but by spending almost two weeks with these hundred or so pages, my students came to see that it was possible to read, understand, and write about difficult and complex material.  Having taught a WATU and an English composition class in the past, I have come to the conclusion that the most fundamental means to improve writing is to make students better readers, to force them to work through and make sense of difficult books.

3)  Since coming to Penn, I have structured all of my classes around roughly the same itinerary of assignments --- an itinerary that begins with shorter papers and ultimately leads to a long, final paper.  While I use midterms and occasionallly final exams to ensure that the students are covering all the material, I believe that my classes, which generally revolve around modern literature, cinema, or theory, ought to demand coherent, written work as a measure of any student's engagement and progress.  Specifically, this decision is tantamount to a few basic practices:  first, each student must, in consultation with me, decide upon his or her topic with respect to what we've studied in class; second, each student must produce an abstract in advance of the final paper, thereby forecasting a thesis, a coherent argument, and a general research plan.

4)  Based on my earlist experiences as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, I have come to realize that all too easily students can elude intellectual supervision or encouragement.  I've made a habit of meeting individually with my students  after major assignments, not only to talk about their respective performances but also to get a sense of how they see themselves within the institutional process.  In a  few cases, for instance, I've advised students to pursue a Comparative Literature degree or minor, but for the most part I've tried to understand the context from which they come to my class.  Last semester, one of my very brightest students was actually majoring in biology, and in discussing the history and philosophy of science (a field in which I've begun to work recently), we found a way in which he could bring some of his scientific knowledge to bear on the question of narrative objectivity.

It is with this last point that I want to conclude, for it encapsulates my real philosophy of teaching.  In essence, I want to provoke my students to think differently, to see that the subjects that concern us in a literature or film class are not hermetically insultated but engage manifold questions in the world at large , whether we make these links to the ideology of science or, as one of my students did, to the ideology of the Michigan Militia.  The willingness to make those conceptual leaps, though by no means always successful, ultimately nourishes a form of critical thinking that I believe to be valuable in any capacity or field.  As a teacher, this is my aim, my philosophy, my ethos.