Jody Greene–Teaching Statement 2000-01
Assistant Professor of Literature and Women's Studies

There is no greater honor for a teacher than to be recognized for excellence in teaching by her students. I want to register a debt of gratitude to my students at the outset for nominating me for this award. If, as I believe, teaching is a collaborative enterprise and the classroom a space of shared endeavor, then my students are as much responsible for any excellence that characterizes my teaching as I am, and deserve their part in this award.

Introduction

I began my teaching career inauspiciously. I was sitting outdoors in the pouring rain, talking about something I knew nothing about. I was at the start of my first course as an instructor for an outdoor education outfit called the National Outdoor Leadership School, and I was teaching a group of mostly college-aged students about setting sprains, strains, and fractures when you are many hours from an x-ray machine, a pair of crutches, or a plaster cast. Unwilling to reveal to these students my complete ignorance of the topic at hand, I had extracted the necessary information from a 1940s military first-aid text, and was teaching the class by showing a series of hastily prepared (and now rain smudged) drawings of human limbs splinted with rifles, stretcher parts, and the lids of metal ammunition boxes. No matter that we were carrying none of these items with us on our month-long journey. I thought the students would pretty much get the point. They didn't.

I'm glad to say no one on the course suffered a strain, a sprain, or a fracture, because had they, they certainly wouldn't have been equipped to manage their injuries on the basis of my rapidly thrown together lesson. Over the next three years of teaching for NOLS, I made some changes to my pedagogy that have stayed with me as I moved into a slightly less mosquito-infested teaching environment–the academy–and a slightly less practical area of study–Restoration and Eighteenth-Century British Literature. If I have a pedagogical theory, that theory is made up mostly of the lessons I learned teaching students how to survive and thrive in the backcountry of Wyoming and Alaska. For the students I now teach at UCSC, I try to remember, the Restoration and the eighteenth century are no less a wild, far away, and possibly dangerous place. These principles, then, have proven surprisingly appropriate as I have moved from the woods into the indoor higher-education classroom.

The main tenet of my pedagogy is one adopted more through necessity than through philosophical conviction: Be prepared at all times to teach unfamiliar things, things you have not mastered or perhaps even encountered before. In my four years teaching at NOLS, it was almost impossible to predict, on a day-to-day basis, what new environments, weather catastrophes, natural phenomena, or human conflicts we might be required to respond to. The school even has a name for how to deal with the strange pedagogical situation of being asked to "teach" about something–a lightning cloud, a brown bear, an unusually flooded river, an unfamiliar flower, another group of hikers–that has only appeared on the horizon in the last 30 seconds. They call these experiences "teachable moments." The tricks for taking advantage of teachable moments are pretty straightforward: use the basis of knowledge you yourself have in related areas to learn as much as you can about this new object through observation, comparison, and analogy; rely on the other people in the group–in most cases, your students–to supply knowledge you yourself lack; and, when it seems appropriate, look in the (albeit limited and possibly soggy) library you are carrying with you to discover further information. You may not learn everything there is to know in a teachable moment, but you will probably learn most of what you actually need to know from the assembled resources of the group.

While the principle of teaching the unfamiliar and the unexpected is something of an inevitable way of life in the career of an outdoor educator, it has been no less omnipresent in my time at Santa Cruz. Since arriving here, I have taught ten new courses over seven quarters, almost all of which are comprised of material I have never taught before. Often, I have never read the material before preparing to teach it either. As a graduate student, I taught composition, using curricula composed primarily of contemporary examples. In fact, when I arrived at Santa Cruz I had never taught an eighteenth-century text of any kind. While this has occasionally led to rather frantic syllabus preparation, necessitating calls to former teachers and colleagues all over the country for advice, I think it has produced courses in which my students can actually experience themselves as engaged in a shared enterprise of learning. Rather than being confronted by a seamless and fully mastered body of knowledge that is there to be absorbed, students in my classes are invited to assess whether or not a text is "worth" reading, and if so, for what reasons. They are encouraged to draw from their own considerable bodies of knowledge and experience to find meaning in the works they read. In fact, one of the delights of teaching in a Literature Department (rather than an English Department like the one in which I was trained) is that students will bring their knowledge of ancient Chinese poetry, Medieval Italian Romance, or African-American science fiction to bear on the literature of the English Restoration, often producing startling and fascinating insights. Through teaching what I donÕt know, I have become familiar with what my students donÕt know–when was the Renaissance? did they speak Old English in the eighteenth century?–but also with what they do.

The tenet of teaching what you donÕt know and sharing the pedagogical burden is fine, of course, at the most abstract level, but courses still demand to be organized and books to be ordered. I want to describe the principles of organization behind three courses I have developed (or revamped) since coming here, in order to show how I put some of these abstractions into action in the undergraduate classroom. I won't address the question of graduate pedagogy at all here, since it's something I'm very new at and something I feel I have only just begun to learn my way around. Instead, I want to focus on some of the ways I have tried to reimagine portions of the early modern British literature curriculum that have remained untaught or too often uninspiring to the primarily presentist students of our department. I have benefited in these endeavors from having a kind of captive audience, since all Literature majors are required to take two pre-1750 courses, and many of these students don't have second-language competency. As a result, the demand for pre-1750 courses in British literature has been significant. It has been my goal not only to meet this demand, but to contrive a curriculum that might actually allow students to enjoy and become increasingly curious about early modern British literature, as well as early modern literature in general. I work from the premise that students with a knowledge of the origins of the debates that preoccupy them–and us–to this day will be better equipped to make progress on those debates, and even to transcend some of them.

The Lecture: "Reading the Traditional Canon, Part One"

Students come to the traditional canon course with a range of motivations–to fulfill their pre-1750 requirement, to increase their cultural literacy, to be exposed to the Great Works of British Literature, to convince their parents that they are learning something substantive while in college. While their reasons for coming may vary, one thing is clear: no student ends up in this course by accident, simply because it fits into his or her schedule. Students come braced, almost palpably tensed, to be bombarded by works they know in advance they will not like. In fact, the great paradox of teaching the traditional canon course–the Scylla and Charybdis around which the Professor is required to navigate–is the fact that students both expect to hate the literature presented and anticipate being asked to love it.

One thing students clearly do not anticipate is being met by a young Assistant Professor with a somewhat skeptical attitude about the entire notion of Great Books. They may expect this sort of interaction in other Literature courses at Santa Cruz, but in the Traditional Canon course, they come prepared for indoctrination. When I arrived, the course had been taught for many years and with great success by the magisterial Michael Warren, who had three things going for him that I did not: vast knowledge of the canon of early modern British literature, white hair, and an English accent. I wanted, however improbably, to try to give students as good a background in British literary history as Michael had given them, while also giving them time and space to ponder why we read the traditional canon–why we even have such a thing as a canon–in the first place.

As I began to design my version of the course, these ambitions became working principles. On the one hand, I wanted students to come away with a basic familiarity with works that constitute the raw materials of the British literary tradition–especially those works referred to, recycled, and contested by later poets. The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost: I wanted students to be able to identify the language and major themes of each of these works (although, as it turned out, students in the course already knew a great deal about some or all of these works, without ever having read or studied them before–knowledge they didnÕt even know they had). On the other hand, though, I wanted to students to read works that have not made it into the literary canon–a canon symbolized relatively effectively by the Norton Anthology of English Literature–and especially works that have moved in and out of the canon at different historical moments. Through the second of these categories, and as a kind of third aim of the course, I wanted to get students thinking about the notion of canonicity itself, and about the question of what it means to create a national literary tradition in the first place. We began the course reading one of the early selections in the Norton–Marie de France's short fables, written in French in the Twelfth century. Doing so brought into stark relief for students some of the most important questions we would contemplate for the rest of the quarter: what is the relationship between British literature and the solidification of the English language, in the Norman period but also, later, in the age of Empire? Can someone be a great author if he, or she, simply recycles old works that have been available for centuries, and if so, in what does his or her greatness lie? And finally, what role do women authors play in British literary history, and how do the conditions of literacy and literary production for aristocratic women differ from those of other women? By starting the course with Marie de France, then, I meant to put some pressure at the outset on the notion that "Reading the Tradition Canon" means reading only Anglo-Saxon, English-speaking men.

On the first day of the course, before students had read a word of poetry, I asked them what sorts of things had brought them to the course in the first place. I then rehearsed for them some of the defenses that have been given of the benefits of studying the works they were about to begin reading. I said:

There seem to be two main schools of thought about the reasons to read the British canon, both of which center on content. One school says that these works contain the best that has been thought and said in Western literary history. We read them in order to see the history of the values we still hold, the values that hold us together as a people (though who this "us" is, given that we are not British, we will have to see). The other school of thought about content-based reading of canonical works agrees that we should read these texts for the values in them, but this school reads the canon as documents of barbarism rather than of civilization. The literary canon teaches us as much about what our precursors in the western tradition did wrong as about what they did right. Thus we read Othello to learn about the history of slavery, The Merchant of Venice for anti-semitism, and just about anything for misogyny. IÕd like to argue that there's a third way of approaching the reading of canonical texts that negotiates between these two. For as often as not, when I go to early modern texts, what I actually find is an odd, even uncanny mixture of values I share and values I find foreign and even abhorrent. Were I to read around in the Great Literature of today, I imagine I would find much the same thing. Perhaps the point of reading the canon, as John Guillory has written, is not locating values at all, but instead "reading in a better way, by which I mean reading works for what they say and do in their place and time, as well as reading the difference between those meanings and the meanings which have been imputed to them by virtue of their being canonical works" (240). We won't always agree, by the way, on the question of "what the[se works] say and do in their place and time," for literary texts are not statements of fact, nor are they statements of truth. The learning we take from canonical works goes on at least as much in the domain of interpretation as it does in the domain of absorption. That's why this course is called "reading the traditional canon" and not "learning the traditional canon." Our primary task, as Guillory says, is to read better.

The Seminar: "Prostitution, Slavery, and the Problem of Human Property after the Restoration"

When I arrived at UCSC, the core sequence of courses in my field still bore the unfortunate and rather forbidding titles, "The Age of Dryden and Pope" and "The Age of Johnson." While I taught courses under this rubric in my first year, I was determined to rethink the literature of Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain to make it meaningful and interesting to UCSC undergraduates. My plan for reorganization stemmed from two key principles. First, many of the issues that continue to preoccupy students, including issues of equality and inequality, questions of human rights and personal liberties, questions of social contract and individual freedom, are precisely the issues that preoccupy Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature. "Their" issues might just turn out to be "our" issues, for certain very good historical reasons. Second, the category "literature," which came to mean primarily "works of the imagination" or "creative works" in the nineteenth century, had little or no meaning for eighteenth-century British subjects. Our students, too, often find the category somewhat contrived, given that their cultural landscape includes film, popular music, new media, television, and the popular press. In order to give students a more thorough, more rigorous, and more compelling introduction to the cultural preoccupations and cultural productions of the period, it would be crucial to offer them works from a wide range of genres, including moral philosophy, political theory, periodical literature, and personal memoir, alongside the more traditional literary genres of the novel, poetry, and drama. Dryden, Pope, and Johnson would all figure in my updated version of the sequence, but so would Hobbes, Locke, sociologist Bernard Mandeville, ex-slave Olaudah Equiano, and "Washerwoman-poet" Mary Collier.

In thinking about the first half of the sequence–approximately from 1660-1730–it struck me that some of the most important and exciting questions circulating in a range of cultural discourses revolved around issues of property, and human property in particular. Do we "own" ourselves? How do we define the self that we own, and what are the consequences of thinking about ourselves in proprietary terms? We know from Locke that we have a proprietary relation to the products of our labor, but what about to our bodies themselves? Should we be allowed to sell our bodies, temporarily (in prostitution) or permanently (in indenture)? Should we be allowed to buy not only the labor but the very "self" of another human being (in slavery, certainly, but in an apprenticeship system as well)? Many of the fundamental questions about human property in the eighteenth century continue to plague us today, in debates about prostitution and slavery, as well as in debates about reproductive rights and responsibilities, surrogacy, immigration, and the limits of parental rights over their semi-adult offspring–a topic near to our students' hearts. By studying the origins of these debates in eighteenth-century Europe, I thought, it might even be possible to come up with some more satisfactory answers to those questions that still remain unanswered about "our bodies" and "our selves."

This, anyway, is what I told the students the course would be about. However, I had a secondary and somewhat clandestine motive in organizing the course around questions of property. The most important factors affecting literary culture in England after the RestorationÑNeoclassicism and the rise of the printing press–could also, I thought, be figured in terms of human property. Appearing in print and offering one's work for sale on the literary marketplace are frequently figured in texts from this period as a kind of prostitution. Neoclassicism, for its part, is frequently compared–especially by those "moderns" hostile to its tenets–to a kind of slavery to the thought and culture of bygone eras. Authors, in fact, faced a seemingly impossible double-bind in this period, ending up either as whores or as slaves–and sometimes, as in the case of Dryden and Pope, as both. Now, it is difficult to get students interested in either Neoclassicism or the rise of print culture, but it certainly makes it easier to convince them of the relevance of these issues if they can see them as part of a broader cultural debate revolving around issues of prostitution and slavery, of self-ownership and the ownership of others, of originality and cultural tradition.

The revamped version of the course exceeded all my expectations, especially at the level of student engagement with the materials. Rather than asking students to write a series of long papers on pre-assigned topics, I had them write a total of four response papers, in which they could either offer a close reading of an assigned text or draw some connections between one of our early modern readings and something they had read or heard about in the news. I received papers on "Eminem, Swift, and the Limits of Satire"; "Maternal Rights and Paternal Fictions: Offspring and Ownership"; "On Being the Object of Property in Patricia Williams and Aphra Behn: A Meditation"; and "Legalizing Prostitution: The Eighteenth Century and the E.U. Debates." Students unabashedly brought their knowledge and their preoccupations to the course, in a way that illuminated the material at hand and pushed their thinking on contemporary issues. In a kind of trade-off, moreover, they dedicated themselves wholeheartedly to my concerns, perhaps because they felt their own interests were being taken seriously. No one came away from my course an expert in Restoration literature, but all of them came away aware of a persistent problem in modern Anglo-American epistemology, the problem of human property, with a more nuanced sense of what the past might have to offer them in the form of tools for thinking about issues that are important to them today. These students don't live in the Age of Dryden and Pope; they live in the age of artificial insemination, cloning, and cybersex. Nonetheless, these new technologies require us both ethically and legally to contemplate the problem of human property with an urgency not unlike that of the age of New World slavery, indentured servitude, and patriarchal rule.

Student-Directed Learning: The Senior Thesis Seminar

In my first two and a half years here at Santa Cruz, I directed six undergraduate theses, often on topics far outside of my area of expertise. Unable to provide students with specific bibliographic references or an overview of the critical history of their fields, I tried instead to provide them with the tools to do their own research and a structured program of assignments leading to the completion of the thesis. While the finished projects were on the whole fairly successful, leading to accomplished research essays completed in a timely fashion, I remained unsure how much benefit students were actually receiving from the thesis-writing process. In particular, I worried that I was simply producing a new generation of atomized, hyper-specialized, solitary scholars. At the end of last quarter, I invited three students who had taken a variety of courses with me to join in an educational experiment. Each would develop an original research project culminating in the production of a 25-page thesis. However, rather than working alone, or alone with me, these students would work together, forming something between a research collective, a writing workshop, and a support group. I gave the students a schedule of assignments to be completed each week: an abstract, an annotated bibliography, a prospectus, one sample reading of a literary work, a revised prospectus, and then a series of drafts of the final essay. Each of these documents would be submitted to me, but each would also be submitted to the other members of the "seminar." The three students would be required to meet together weekly, sometimes with me but more often without. Each could come and see me independently at any time, but the weekly collective meetings were required regardless of time spent with me. Each student would be responsible for reading and commenting on the work of the others, and then discussing those comments at the weekly meetings.

Within a week of the beginning of the term, all three students had independently registered their surprise at how beneficial this collective learning and writing experience was turning out to be. In particular, the students commented on the unlikely and extremely helpful pieces of knowledge and experience the others had been able to share about their specific projects, as well as about the more general processes of research and writing. I have been somewhat surprised to find that while they receive written comments on their work from me each week, and while they sometimes ask me for references, the students rarely come to see me, and seem to look to each other instead when they have questions like, "what's a prospectus?" or "how do you get books through Interlibrary Loan?"–all questions that I have fielded from my other thesis students in the past. Being in a writing group clearly also keeps these students on track, since none of them has missed a deadline, or even asked for an extension–again, unlike any thesis students I have had in the past.

I'm not sure it would be possible or profitable to systematize this model of thesis preparation, and I'm certainly not advocating that we try to do so in Literature. These students were hand-picked by me for their motivation, their independence, and their responsibility. However, I do think that if the opportunity arises to gather together students engaged in independent research projects, they–and we–receive multiple and potentially enduring benefits from such collaborative enterprises. All of these students, for instance, have expressed an interest in going on to graduate school. Perhaps they will arrive there with a sense that collaboration, collective enterprise, and shared knowledge can produce even better results than the model of individual, competitive, scholarly isolation in which most of their teachers were trained.