James McCloskey– Teaching Statement 2001-02
Professor of Linguistics

There is a strand of thought which sees a deep division between two of the kinds of work that faculty members are asked to do--teaching and research. The demands of one are seen as eating in to the time available to do the other. This is a common-sense point of view, and like many other common sense points of view, it seems to me to be wrong, or at best over-simplified.

The kind of teaching that is most worth doing is teaching that imparts to the students a set of skills rather than (or in addition to) a body of information. My own field is formal linguistics (broadly speaking, the scientific investigation of human language) and within that larger field, I specialize in formal syntax--the attempt to understand what principles guide the building of phrases and sentences in natural language from their basic parts (roughly speaking, words). Much of the teaching that we do in my department and in the discipline at large attempts to impart to students not a body of established results, but rather an analytical method--how to perceive a pattern in a body of observation, how to construct an understanding of that pattern, how to subject that understanding to skeptical scrutiny, and how to build incrementally on that initial foundation. That is, we use the data of natural language to ground an attempt to teach students how to construct partial theories, how to argue for and against those theories, and how to deepen understanding by incrementally revising and extending those partial theories.

The data of our field (the basic facts of natural language structure) make this project simultaneously possible and difficult.

Every student comes in to the classroom a native speaker of at least one language. Every student, therefore, begins the course with the capacity (inctricate but taken for granted) to compose the words of their language into the complex and highly structured objects that we call phrases and sentences. This is the raw data that we go to work on, and it is free and reproducible.

But language is also a central cultural symbol and students as a consequence bring to the class with them a network of received ideas about what is right and wrong, about what it is to be valued and what is not. The first task is to subject those preconceptions to critical scrutiny and to take them apart.

Assuming nothing then, the class begins a collaborative effort to explore the principles that determine the forms of their native language. This effort proceeds incrementally, through a series of difficult homework assignments, each of which asks them to push further in analysis. The process of incremental revision, criticism, and theory-construction, leads the class to construct, in the space of the quarter, a sophisticated theory of a substantial sub-part of the language. Along the way, they learn about theory-construction, theory-revision and about the importance of precision. Most importantly perhaps, they learn to abandon cherished ideas and theories and they learn the value of incremental deepening of understanding.

For those who go on in the field, these courses provide a foundation of analytical ability which forms the core of most of what they subsequently do in the field. For those who move on to other areas (into industry for example), they bring from the experience certain crucial skills--the ability to take a problem apart, approach it rationally, and think about it clearly, the ability to do collaborative intellectual work, and the willingness not to cling to one's favorite ideas once they are seen not to work.

This is the most exciting and useful teaching I have done anywhere, but it has its risks and costs. Since each course offering really is a collaborative intellectual effort on the part of all involved, and since each group has its distinctive intellectual personality, the path followed is different every time, and the point reached is different for each group. What is important is the method by which that point is reached, not the point itself. But this means in turn that each course goes its own way, and that each class must to a certain inevitable degree be improvised. One can never know for certain where the student's questions, arguments and hypotheses will leave one by the end of a given class-period, and closing off false paths by too firmly insisting on a right answer or too firmly asserting professional authority would defeat the purpose--that of teaching a mode of inquiry as well as a body of results.

The teaching experience that emerges from these commitments can be a thrilling one, particularly with an able and collaborative group, but it can also be nerve-wracking. It is also (for me at least) emotionally demanding. Built as it is on the assumption that students can do a lot in a quarter, the method asks a great deal of them. I know of no way to persuade students to make the kind of effort that is needed other than by exposing oneself emotionally to them, clowning a little, and making it clear in addition that one is making the same kind of effort that they are making.

The emotional and intellectual returns, however, are large. One's own favorite ideas are subject to the most critical scrutiny possible--the scrutiny of those who have been encouraged to be skeptical, who have been given the tools to discover inconsistencies and inadequacies and who have no stake whatever in believing that any of the ideas that emerge are right. Explaining and defending one's foundational assumptions, without the benefit of a textbook, to a critical and uncommitted audience is an experience not to be missed. It is at this point, and in this way, that the teaching experience feeds back in to the research experience.

There is, in addition, some curious serendipitous effect by which the questions that students zero in on in a given quarter are very often exactly those which are topical in the field at that same point. Time and again it has happened to me that such questions have been re-focussed for me by the need to find some way of re-presenting them to 40 or 50 undergraduates who know how to analyze but who have been doing syntax for nine weeks or less. These are the most difficult classes, when they happen, but they are often also the most magical.