Melanie DuPuis– Teaching Statement 2002-03
Assoc. Professorof Sociology

When preparing my classes, I try to imagine in the audience a student a lot like myself at 16. At that age, I was the fortunate recipient of a scholarship to a prestigious prep school. In the middle of my sophomore year, I packed my bags and left my public high school where, as a girl who actively participated in class discussion, I was labeled “The Amazon.” Yet, while I envisioned Phillips Exeter as my Land of Milk and Honey, I was totally unprepared for my first history class. We were expected to read The Federalist Papers: The original document! Not the textbook summary! That was only my first surprise. Struggling through the language, I arrived in class still not entirely sure what the document said and assuming the teacher would explain it for us. In fact, he expected us to explain it to him! Then, the final surprise: most of the other students not only could read and understand the text, they could articulate its meaning with ease. All I could do is sit back and wonder, “Where did these people come from?” “How did they manage to know so much?” and “Can I possibly survive this class?”

Looking around my Classical Sociological Theory class in the fall, I can see exactly those thoughts coursing through the minds of many of my students, as we begin reading Hobbes, in the original. I recognize the fright in their eyes. I can see myself in them. But I also recognize that my struggles in that prep school history class represented the beginning of an exciting intellectual journey. My job, as teacher, is to move students from the fear of not measuring up to the excitement of ideas. Once the excitement captures you, it doesn’t matter if everyone else in the room knows more, or can write better, or knows how to study for an essay exam when you haven’t the slightest idea. Your journey has begun.

Humor is a great way to calm fears and generate excitement. Intellectual activity, while wonderful, is in some ways pretty absurd and I try to cultivate this sense of the absurd while communicating the importance of ideas. Blue Man Group, the performance artists, take pedagogy of the absurd to a fine extreme, and I have learned a lot from them and other performance artists like Laurie Anderson. I think it would be great to invite performance artists to come to campus and talk to professors about “teaching.”

First and foremost, I try to put the inscrutable into the context of the familiar. I pretend I’m Oprah Winfrey and interview Hobbes, Locke, Marx and the rest on her show (their answers come out in PowerPoint speech bubbles). For Weber, I act out a Germanic Hero, waving my grandfather’s Knight’s Templar sword, while my TAs, moving in line, act out the rationalized modern army. For The Protestant Ethic, my class becomes a church and we all stand and sing Calvinist hymns. It’s a lot of fun and it’s great to see the fear turn to, “Yeah, I get that.”

While my intrinsic hammy-ness does me well in larger classes, I’ve had a harder time inspiring students in my smaller upper division classes. They just didn’t seem to want to work very hard. They didn’t want to say much, especially to each other. Fear just seemed to grow. Classes were tense. I kept heaping on the ideas, hoping something would “catch.”

The breakthrough for me happened last Spring, when long-time UCSC Lecturer, Robert Weil, went in for emergency surgery. I ended up taking over both of his classes. Five weeks into the quarter, I was teaching someone else’s course, with his syllabus and structure. At first, I was skeptical of his approach: How could he assign so little reading? Isn’t it a “cop-out” to have the students lead so many classes? What if they don’t learn what I want them to know?

Once I walked into Bob Weil’s classroom, I understood. He treated them like adults, so they acted like adults. They came to class prepared, taking responsibility for working through ideas. They discussed the material with each other, respectfully disagreeing with each other, carefully articulating alternative points of view. They weren’t overwhelmed by the crush of ideas presented in too much reading. Rather, they worked through fewer ideas more thoroughly. While they might not have learned everything I wanted them to know, they learned a great deal more that they wanted – and needed – to know. In addition, Bob set it up so that the students had to work with each other. By the end of the class, the students knew each other as people. Not only were they on an intellectual journey, but they had crossed paths with other journeys and had learned in that process.

When Bob recovered a bit, I called and asked him how he got his students to that point. He told me: “There are always long silences at the beginning, until the students realize that they are the class.” Ever since, I have re-structured my classes in the Bob Weil mode. In my last quarter’s class on Environmental Inequality, this strategy worked so well that my evaluations mostly describe what the class accomplished and the class learned from each other, with each individual evaluation about how that student contributed to the class as a whole. As I say in each evaluation: “It was a remarkable class.” The students made it remarkable. I set up the process, introduced the concepts, and got out of the way.