When I was nineteen I felt as if every college course I was taking was part of some bigger class, that everything was interconnected and resonating with deeper meanings. What I studied in Introduction to Philosophy permeated my work in Expository Writing and influenced what I was seeing in Biology 101, Sociology 101, and The History of Western Civilization (this was 1985, after all). Higher education was an intricate web of intersections.
My life outside of the classroom—informally and through more formal co-curricular activities—sustained this sense of interconnectedness. During study breaks my friends and I would pass around notebooks we kept—what I later learned were called “commonplace books”—to share the latest quotations we had copied down from our course readings, lectures, and other books we picked up for pleasure. This was a pre-internet, pre-social media world. We were an eclectic bunch, studying Humanities, Social Science, Natural Science, and Economics. Some of us had been raised in the country, some in the city, and others in the suburban in-between. I was pre-med and a declared Biology major.
Early on I came to think that this was the best part of university life—that we all participated in the great circulation of knowledge and that this circulation of methods, theories, and data had untold consequences and reverberations. The waves of knowledge collided in untold ways, bending, refracting, and producing unique undulations, never-before-heard sounds and, in some cases, very familiar ones.
What does this have to do with my teaching and how I stay passionate about this work? Well, for one, this awareness of interconnectedness informs my interest in interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, and relationality and drives my research and teaching interests in Indigenous literature and film. In the pursuit of this work I’m not far away from my nineteen-year-old self; though I’m no longer sharing a commonplace book, I’m still following connections across disparate fields and pursuing the work of thinkers far afield from my home disciplinary field of literary studies. In this way I stay impassioned about the work because I continue to see multiple, seemingly endless strands in a larger web. It informs the way I try to encourage students to pursue their own passions and to discover meaningful connections between the work they’re doing in my class and the other courses they are taking. Last month, in line at a café, I encouraged a Construction Management major to take an art history class; just the other day, a former student thanked me for encouraging her to take a course in Anthropology and one in Ethnic Studies. I make these suggestions because I want students to make discoveries in unexpected places in ways that may indelibly alter how they think about academia and their future roles once they graduate.
In quite another way, though, I foster a learning environment that prioritizes if not encourages self-discoveries that rely on intuition, exploration, serendipity and the willingness to try and retry. I recently heard a musicologist discuss his cross-disciplinary course on sound. In the course, as in academia more generally, he argued that any artistic practice is “disciplined dreaming.” I would take this perhaps one step further: any intelligent practice should call on the power of disciplined dreaming. I’ve read in numerous biographies of Albert Einstein that he felt his most significant breakthroughs emerged out of the experience of being creative, of being attuned to his imagination and intuition. Often, his greatest discoveries were inspired by listening to music.
Deep learning, deep thinking takes time and there are no direct paths in the web of meaning. Serendipity can’t be programmed. Heading down unpredictable paths and finding the way on your own are not efficient strategies. At NAU our Liberal Studies program is designed in part to support opportunities for students to discover connections on their own in ways that are personalized and meaningful. Rather than think about non-major courses as the fulfillment of a checklist of requirements, or as a “brick” in the foundation of learning, I hope students will see that courses in other disciplines are the means by which we develop new neural pathways that spark the fire of our imaginations.
This is the inaugural column for “Teaching with Fire,” a new feature sponsored by the Teaching Academy at NAU. We conceived of this space as a way to sustain (and initiate, in many instances) a conversation about what keeps us impassioned about teaching, what keeps us connected to what our students need as learners, and what we need to foster student learning. Columns will initially be written by other President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellows and members of The Teaching Academy, but we hope you’ll join the conversation and pitch an idea for a future column. What keeps you fired up about teaching? Do you have specific strategies, pedagogical philosophies, or pragmatic approaches that evoke student learning and that keep you tuned in? We’re sure you do. Please share them with us.
Jeff Berglund is the Director of Liberal Studies and a Professor of English. In 2008 he was selected as an inaugural President’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow. His newest book, “Indigenous Pop: Native American Music from Jazz to Hip Hop” (University of Arizona Press), was published in March 2016.
3 Comments
Claire Schonaerts – 4/11/2016 7:57:09 AM
Your post had be thinking nostalgically about my earliest years of college. The world was a different place in the mid-sixties. I will agree that some of those first courses in my pursuit of a college education created the anchoring threads for what my father called, “a real education.” Our home was lined with books and the expectation was that we would read each one, two thousand or so before we graduated from high school. That didn’t happen. However, the desire to learn from a variety of authors was planted deep into my thinking. My first courses in biology along with my philosophy classes still resonate in the way I approach new ideas. The eclectic component you speak of still triggers curiosity and any mention of something “off the beaten track” can spark a wholesome conversation with my current students. What continues to spark my teaching? These days, it’s more the questions students ask rather than the questions I have ready for them. Because today’s students are gathering information (false or authentic) from a variety of sources their conversations seem to be multi-leveled. Some of our best moments together are when we leave questions unanswered with lots of room for thinking. Perhaps it’s my way of honoring their ideas while I consider the changes in my own thinking framework.
Samantha Clifford – 4/12/2016 2:32:25 PM
Thank you both for initiating the conversation! It has helped me to reflect on why I am dedicated to education. Initially, I was not a “good” student. Once I got to college, I realized that I got as much as I gave. I fell in love with learning, and there were a few professors that sparked that interest and thirst for knowledge. As an educator, I believe that it is my job to challenge learners to look at the world differently. I am not necessarily attempting to change perspectives, but rather to unlock the awareness that different ways of knowing the world are valuable. The endeavor of teaching is intricately tied to learning, and to be considered a successful enterprise I believe that both activities should result in a transformational educational experience. My intent, when I walk into a classroom is to make students feel excited, interested, and become committed to learning as a lifelong goal. Learning and teaching are woven together by the practice of student engagement with the content. To be effective, relevant and meaningful, the activity of teaching must be bidirectional. I hope to continue to learn from students and to create a learning environment where everyone contributes to the production of knowledge. Although I may be the expert in the content area, I attempt to incorporate, recognize, and value learner’s previous knowledge and experience. My goal is to create a community of learners through my teaching and research endeavors. I try to establish an atmosphere where learners can explore language use, reflect on their assumptions, beliefs, values, and socialization that contributes to our outlook, and often unexamined biases that create our individual realities and worldview. I recognize that beliefs, attitudes, ideas of truth, norms, and behavior result from enculturation, which is invisible to most of us. Therefore the ability to deconstruct this process of enculturation can lead to a transformation of ideas and change the way we see the world. The university classroom can be one tool to foster this transformative educational experience.
John Tingerthal – 4/19/2016 8:36:18 AM
I struggle with getting my students to take their liberal studies courses seriously. Even as an engineering student in the 80’s, I just saw these courses as necessary boxes to check in my march toward graduation. The personal invitation to one of my CM students from Jeff is the type of thing that I believe can be very powerful. We all need to take advantage of such situations to inspire our students to broaden their educational horizons.