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© 2006 UC Santa Cruz
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Wendy Martyna– Teaching Statement 2002-03 Thinking (and Feeling) Deeply about Teaching and Learning Asked in this brief essay to demonstrate that I “think deeply about teaching and learning, and apply that thinking in the classroom,” I hardly know where to end. Beginning is easy – I have always loved teaching and learning. I bribed other neighborhood kids to “play school” with me, in the summers, on weekends, even right after school let out. It took the promise of chocolate chip cookies to get them to come sit in my garage and do my homemade worksheets, so I would have something to “grade.” As it turns out, grading is not my favorite part of teaching, but I still feel that learning can be play–good, hard play–filled with experimentation, discovery, and exuberance. I began teaching at UCSC twenty-five years ago, just after earning my Ph.D. in Psychology at Stanford, a young Assistant Professor eager to do it all: teaching, research, writing, activism. I got here just in time for the final year of Teacher on the Hill, a weekly lunchtime group that gathered across disciplines, and published a journal in which we explored our thinking – and our feeling – about the art of teaching. I organized lunches for women faculty where we could talk of teaching, and probe the particular issues facing us as female professors. And I was free to teach classes that meant the most to me: Social Psychology of Death and Dying, Psychology of Writing, Language and the Sexes, Social Psychology of Childhood. But five years later, even after a successful mid-career review, I chose to leave the tenure track. I couldn’t do it all, after all. It seemed there was never enough time to devote to teaching, my primary purpose in becoming a professor. But what felt at the time like my swan song (when I was chosen by Stevenson students to give their commencement address) turned out to be only one note in an ongoing score, for I decided to stay on as a Lecturer. Teaching could now be my main focus. Later, that focus expanded to include many other contexts, such as private workshops, community college classes for re-entry women, courses for home schooled children, public lectures, radio work, community organizing. And for several years I studied, and then began to teach, poetry and storytelling, to schoolchildren as well as professionals, here and in the U.K. Eight years ago, I returned to UCSC as a Lecturer, bringing back into my classrooms all I had come to learn outside of them. New courses came my way: Sociology of Love, Sociology of Emotions, Family and Society, along with my former courses on gender, and on Death and Dying. I resurrected the Teaching Practicum model I’d first developed in 1980, training a core group of undergraduates to lead discussion sections for my very large classes. And I returned to teaching College Core Courses. At Cowell and Merrill for the past eight years, I’ve savored the interdisciplinary emphasis, as well as the attention to first principles, that characterize these small seminars.My courses pose questions, both big ones and small. Here’s a big one, for example: What can social psychology tell us about the things we worry most about–love and death and sex and time and the meaning of our lives (and also important: What does it fail to tell us?). Such questions takes us on journeys, with beginnings (What do you already know, or assume you know, about this topic?) as well as endings (What will you do with what you know now? What do you still need to know?). On the last day of class, I often write on the board these lines from e.e. cummings: “Always the beautiful answer which asks a more beautiful question.” “Which do you think came first, “ I asked a recent class, “Sociology or Death and Dying?” I want it clear that we are going to have to cross boundary lines to get where we are going on this questioning journey. William Miller, a Professor of Law writing on social psychological themes, hoped his work could “make some small breaches in the monstrously thick wall that divides the academic and non-academic worlds.” Often, I like to take down the walls altogether – showing film excerpts, reciting poetry, telling stories, bringing in speakers who are doing the very work the students are reading about. It’s risky to leave the lecture outline for a moment, let alone the discipline, but it’s exhilarating, too. Sometimes I lose my way. Then I think on what Miles Davis said, “Do not fear mistakes. There are none.” It’s how you find your way back that makes the music, not the fact that you got lost for a moment, hearing the sound of something new. And I try to go by this truth – you have to practice your scales, so your improvisations can shimmer and shine. Explication and extension – these are what my lectures attempt. Not just repeating what they have read, but trying to clarify it, to help students discern the central, the guiding ideas. But often, I use lectures to range beyond the assigned material, to extend and to amplify, to draw connections. For instance, what does this research finding have to do with what you read in today’s paper (so many students don’t read a newspaper at all, this helps them learn to link what is learned “on the hill” with what boils and bubbles in the rest of the world). And I draw in interdisciplinary readings; to show how an idea is approached from different starting points, or articulated with differing intents. About 30 years older now than most of my students, I work to make sure my offhand references don’t seem, to them, entirely off the wall. I find ways to find out what concerns them. Last week, for example, I asked them to list ten news events from their lifetime, which had most affected their attitudes towards death and dying. After categorizing their responses, I integrated them into my next lecture on contemporary cultural influences. I also asked them to generate the headlines they’d most like to see in the coming ten years (world peace was mentioned most often, but their hopes were varied and inspiring). I continue to read everything they write, even though all my classes are large. Their papers let them reflect on what they are learning, and I need to hear that. I comment on their writing; and am always nudging them to attend to grammar, to form, to clarity. To criticize for that purpose is essential, but most important is to praise, to find the perfect phrase and tell them just how good it is. I want them not only to know that it matters -- the way they say what they say -- but also that someone is listening. With permission, I read a student paper in class from time to time. Hearing another student’s words can have surprising impact (“I had no idea,” one told me, “that other students were writing so beautifully of such things.”) And a freeing effect, as well (“Perhaps I should also write of things that matter.”) I welcome creativity into the classroom, and have found some structural ways to encourage it. Along with the usual identification and essay questions, there is sometimes a model-building portion of my Midterm exams -- take these three items, and use them (along with anything else you choose), to construct a model of some idea or theory we have studied. The night I thought of this, my kids and I sat on the floor at home, stocking each of 100 baggies with a penny, a piece of string, and a 3x5 index card. Walking into class on the day the models were due, my initial relief at seeing that they’d actually done them turned to rapture. I’d worried they’d scoff at the ‘silliness’ of the assignment, but instead, the long front table was covered with creation: a delicate clay sculpture, several drawings, a three dimensional collage, a complex mobile, and much else. Ideas beautifully brought to life. I recall the young science major who had spent six straight hours crafting an elaborate collage representing the life cycle, and nearly wept as he presented it. He said he’d put away his art when he first came to college, but now, once more, had felt the exhilaration of creating something new. Final presentations are another invitation to create. They are optional, but the last day of class is always filled with folks who step up front to present something of themselves and what they’ve learned. One of many vivid memories comes to me now; a re-entry woman, holding her final project in her trembling hands. It had been twenty years since she’d dared to create anything, and she told us why. A nun had once displayed her drawing to the whole 4th grade class, saying, “Now here is an example of some work that demonstrates no creativity whatsoever.” Art can be healing, and learning can be healing, and teaching can be, too. It is the whole person I try to keep in mind when I teach, as well as the person they are hoping to become. It is my own “becoming” I nurture, too, for it’s always changing -- the books I assign, the syllabi I design, what I think to say and do in the classroom. It seems I’m always beginning again. Each quarter, a new chance to get it right, or to fail in interesting ways, as I remember someone saying (just can’t remember who). And the first day of school still intoxicates, especially in fall. I remember filling my notebook with all that promising blue lined paper, sharpening my pencils for the homework to come–the mysterious math problems each with their own true answer, the spelling words that would help me say still more. I ended up dropping out of college in deep disappointment over what I found there, but a year later, I returned, having decided to become a college teacher myself. Emile Zola said that, as an artist, he came here “to live out loud.” Of course, I wanted to avoid the deadliness of so many classrooms I’d been entombed in as a student. But even more, I wanted the teaching and learning atmosphere alive with energy. Praise to those teachers who taught me that was possible– who loved students as well as books, and were not afraid to show that love out loud, every single day. I always want my teaching to honor what I learned from those who have gone before. Let me share one praise song here, of all the many I wish to sing. To my high school debate coach, Miss Bridges, driving us all down Lombard Street on a rainy San Francisco night, belting out an aria in her VW van, exuberant at our first place victory in one more far-away tournament she gladly drove us to, nearly every weekend. I can hear her large laugh now. Maybe you can, too; she’s there in some golden place our memory safeguards, along with all the other teachers who give us so much more than they can ever know.
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