Learning, not teaching

Al Filreis

This space could be retrofitted into sixteen seminar rooms, or two or three small houses.

A brilliant former student, now pondering a career as a teacher, asks a few questions. I hope he will forgive me the pithy responses.

What do you think is the purpose of education?

Not to teach but to enable learning. That will sometimes entail teaching, but mostly will entail other modes. These other modes are best effected in small groups (either in person or virtual, but ideally small in number). These other modes should probably not be put into practice in a classroom. Maybe, to take one possible example, in an old house.

Why do you think it is important to teach?

Not “important to teach,” but important to be part of organizations dedicated to enabling learning. The reasons for that are obvious, I hope. Learners often (although not always) benefit from guidance when they deal with materials and with problems new to them. They also benefit from guidance when the environment (outside schools — e.g. stressed or nonfunctioning families, war-torn or poverty-stricken communities, etc.) is not otherwise conducive to thought.

What strategies or methods do you think are effective?

Leading discussions of problems and materials enables learning and application of lessons to other contexts and situations. Lecturing enables consumption, reinforcement of subject discipline, belief in the authority of the lecturer, and silos of intellection.

A few hours after I published it, a student whom I know (but who has not taken my classes) read the above commentary carefully. Where was she at the time? In a “two-hundred-person lecture class.” She wrote a thoughtful response (on a laptop wirelessly connected) about the thing to which she was failing to attend, but, judging from the quality of her writing on this topic, I’ll venture to say she was learning quite a bit about learning. This special sort of inattention thrills me. It hints at a counter-hegemony of the seminar-style discussion — the give-and-take of a student and a teacher that can be managed all while the lecturer continues on. (By the way, three weeks into the semester, this student reports, the attendance at sessions of the lecture course has dwindled to 25%. This is apparently typical.)

February 3, 2012

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pedagogy

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.