Dana Frank – Teaching Statement 2000-01
Professor, American Studies

I find it difficult to write about my teaching activities, since in so many ways my relationship to my students is a private activity, a sort of pact or bond between us that is unobserved by outsiders and, usually, invisible to them. And yet at the same time my teaching is an enormously public activity, since it treats the difficult questions of race, class, gender, and social activism in the United States and does so in a manner deliberately designed to facilite my students' lifetimes of socially committed public life.

In American Studies, I teach undergraduate courses on the history, present, and future of race, class, and gender dynamics in the United States. My particular focus is on dynamics of class and working-class activism, always within a multicultural and feminist lens and, increasingly, in a global context. I take up pressing concerns such as globalization, welfare, low-wage work, or institutionalized racism, and place them in historical perspective. All this means that my classes are always potentially volatile spaces, laced with controversies and inequalities present in the classroom and in my students' daily lives. At the same time my goal, in all teaching, is social justice, democracy, and equality.

My teaching philosophy begins with very high standards. I tell my students the very first day that studies have shown that the higher the teacher's expectations, the better the students' performance and the more they learn; therefore, I expect them all to work very hard and to learn enormous amounts. I don't grade on a curve in any way, but, rather, tell them that it's my job to try to help them all do extremely well, to the best of their abilities. I expect students to attend every class but one; I expect them to come on time; and I expect them to complete all the readings every week; and if they can't meet these expectations, they shouldn't take my class. I've had students repeatedly tell me this approach changed their entire relationship to school: because I took them seriously, they took their work seriously, and they became much more committed students.

In exchange, I tell them, I will promise never to bore them. I will try to give dynamic, challenging lectures that help explain the world we live in. And I will promise to give them enormous amounts of advice on their writing. I find that upper-division UCSC students rarely receive advice on the structures of their writing, and so I put a lot of work into helping every student become a much better writer, whatever their initial skill level. I pay special attention to those with lower skills, but also challenge students who are used to sliding by with the same generally adequate approach to move to a higher level of literary device and complexity.

As a teacher, my goal is to reach and serve every single student in the class. Visually, I imagine myself reaching into and pulling out the corners of the room, so no student is lost or hidden, but, rather, celebrated and nurtured. When I was first teaching, I was more of a perfectionist: even through the time when I got tenure, I would beat myself over the head if there were just one or two students I hadn't reached. Then I let go, in part liberated by tenure, and accepted I couldn't reach perhaps five percent of any given class. Ironically, I'm a better teacher as a resultÑI'm more playful, more relaxed, more willing to take risks, and less exhausted.

My goal of reaching and serving every single student is just a subset, though, of a larger philosophy of equality in the classroom. This is where things get tough: my students don't walk into that room as equals, and our society and culture are deeply structured around inequalityÑthat's precisely what the content of my courses addresses. I've found much to my endless horror that if I don't intervene strongly to try to change inequalities in my classroom, I myself will be part of replicating and encouraging them.

The first day of class I speak at length about this, in order to introduce a complex politics of classroom process in which we will all be struggling. Here's part of what I say: We are all part of a deeply unequal society. Some of us have been socialized to dominate, to claim verbal space, to feel that our every idea is precious and important and should be shared. Others of us have been told to shut up, that we're stupid, or that it's culturally inappropriate to speak in public or think our ideas matter. Still others grew up feeling intellectually powerful but have been taught by experiences at UCSC and before that it's not safe to speak out. Very delicately I say that these differences are structured along axes of race, class, and gender inequality and that, as much as possible, we don't want to replicate such dominations in our classroom. Therefore, we all have a responsibility to change things.

In seminars, I point out that on the average a given student can only speak a certain numbers of times per class, or they're taking up more than their share. I say that some people need a longer lag time to speak up because of cultural differences or because they're scared. And I tell them stories I've learned of gender or race dynamics in the classroom: how men tend to respond to other men's comments; how white people tend to suddenly look at people of color the minute race comes up as a topic, and how hard that is for the students of color. I say explicitly that since I'm white, that already introduces power imbalances in the classroom. I don't say this, but I've spent years decoding these dynamics and am constantly trying to devise methods to subvert them. Once the class is underway, I employ various tricks to get silenced students participating verbally and feeling safe, and they usually workÑchanging the conversation itself. One thing I've learned is that the students who talk first, and most, set the topics and style of the content to be discussed, further snowballing the marginalization of less vocal students; so I plan with quieter students in advance to call on them first, and let them start the ball rolling intellectually.

In a lecture class, it's even more challenging. I introduce a rule the first day: since, as all students know, in most classes the same four or five students ask all the questions, I have a rule that no one can ask more than one question or comment per class. Halfway through the quarter, I'll ask for questions only from people who haven't been asking questions at all. I try to do all this with a sense of humor and comradeship, so everyone can feel part of the process of subverting inequality.

Through all this, I am paying careful attention to my students. What are their questions? What are their life experiences? Hopes and dreams? How can I make the connection between what I want to teach them and what they want to learn? I spend time in my office, before and after classÑI usually arrive fifteen minutes early and stay late afterwardsÑlistening to them. I am also trying to keep track of at-risk students who might be faltering in the ability to keep on top of school, and give them special support. Usually these are students of color and/or working-class students, to whom I am particularly committed. In the process, I learn things about how better to teach them. One recent revelation was that while most privileged students welcome the idea of meeting with a teacher individually or in office hours, many working-class students think you only talk to the teacher when you're in trouble; therefore, you stay away. I needed to address this barrier directly if I were going to reach these students.

My goal in all thisÑboth in the form and in the content of my teachingÑis my students' empowerment. I teach about the labor movement, about movements against racism, about successful resistance to corporate power, and I want to teach my students that they, too, are powerful. Thus, I not only fill my courses with stories of successful activities for social change but offer my students the opportunity to be part of something larger than themselves, stretching back centuries and into all of our futures together. I talk to them about how learning to write and think critically are part of this process. I bring role models into the classroom as much as possible, both to show them possible life choices and to balance my own voice as a white teacher with voices of people of color.

Again, I try to model what we're trying to achieve in the classroom, so the classroom becomes a conduit between the course materials and the outside world. I encourage them to learn each others' namesÑeven in a class with 70 students. I encourage creative announcements at the beginning of class, not only about events related to the course subject but any achievements in their own lives, such as a performance, which, I say, we should try to attend. When it's exam time, I suggest they bring an extra blue book for a fellow-student in the class who might have forgotten theirs.

Finally, I try to make myself obsolete. Here's one of the invisible parts: in every course I try to show them how they can learn to do what I doÑhow to use a library, how to find my lecture material, how to speak with confidence about the topics, including, in one course, the most intimidating issues of political economy. Since my courses often begin historically and end up in the present, or begin with a social problem and end with possible solutions, their final papers are frequently about activism to which they themselves are attractedÑand which I see as a passage to their own lives beyond the university. At the end of a course, I don't want them to think I did a great job teaching them, but, rather, that they did a great of learning and that they don't need me to keep that process going. I step off the stage, and it's in their hands.