Nathan P. Gilmour
Department of English, University of Georgia
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Teaching at its root is a practice in developing imaginations. Before one goes about changing one’s world, one ought to understand the shape and character of that world, and every subject’s interaction with objects happens through and with and in response to words and ideas and debates and traditions. Whatever else happens when a college professor teaches college students, the class’s vocabulary should grow, not only in words but also in concepts and categories. As an apprentice chemist learns the notations and categories that make up the chemist’s discourse through study and experiment, so a student of literature learns both the terminology with which the scholarly community converses and studies. In both cases the student studies with a more experienced practitioner texts and other artifacts that the teacher decides might be worth studying. Both practices expand and refine vocabularies, hopefully to the end of shaping human beings as self-conscious and world-conscious intellectuals. And such consciousness always results in changed imaginations, minds that see differently the world and the self.
As vocabularies expand, practical disciplines anchor intellectual pursuits in embodied communities, a key for the humble appreciation of the discipline. My classroom is not a time and a space simply for lecturing and note-taking but also for moral formation, the kind of thing that happens when a coach teaches a player how to excel within the rules of basketball or when a practicing scientist mentors a laboratory assistant in the ways that the scientific community lives a scientific life. With English in particular moral learning must necessarily involve honesty at the level of research and composition but also extends to the ways in which a community asks difficult questions together, the practice of kindness as well as suspicion in reading texts, and diligence in adjusting one’s self and one’s vocabularies to the inquiry at hand. When I evaluate and grade a paper, my purpose is not primarily to communicate to graduate schools a student’s talent abstracted from the aims of the class but to let the student know where the next step towards competence lies. When we read texts together my aim is not merely to “problematize” conventional wisdom but to model and to develop those aptitudes that allow one to live well alongside and within complex situations (including those most complex of entities, human communities). Every incoming college class is in some sense a class chosen for service, young people with the drive and ability to effect change for the good of communities, local and global, church bodies and bodies politic. My classes always attempt to make small steps towards developing that class.
When a student leaves my classroom, I have contributed four months’ instruction to a life that spans years. Thus humility ought to inform my goals for students. In one semester a student in my English class ought to have a stronger grasp of critical and conceptual vocabularies relevant to the texts at hand. She should have practiced, at least for the span of one major project, those virtues proper to a truthful and diligent researcher and synthesizer of the scholarship available. Depending on the sort of class, he also should have at least a working familiarity with the spectrum of approaches that might lead to a good life in a world made more complex and some apparatus for evaluating those approaches. If the student reaches those things, then the person leaving my class will have partaken in the humanities, those disciplines that bring consciousness and ethics and imagination together for the good of a larger community.
An institution's ethos informs my role in its work. If I work for a research university, I will work diligently to publish scholarship worthy of consideration by those who read it, and if I work for a teaching college, I will devote my work life to improving as an instructor and mentor. In both cases I will perform all the duties of my office, as scholar and as teacher, and will "work for the welfare of the city" (Jeremiah 29:7) where I serve. As a Christian professor, I will teach whatever content is at hand, realizing that my work as an intellectual cannot ever be entirely separate from theological convictions but at the same time must work alongside other ideologies and philosophies. Such a relationship can never become prosyletizing, but at the same time I will work as a Christian professor even as my colleagues work as psychoanalytic critics, new historicists, and capitalists. Whatever else the work of the university entails, it also stands as a time and a place where such philosophies engage common questions, serve a common body of students, and teaches with humility, no professor considering himself greater than his role among a faculty nor holding herself lower than a teacher of students.
If I should land at a Christian college, I will likewise let its ethos inform my work. However, the resonance between my role as Christian parishoner and lay teacher on one hand and my role as Christian professor on the other has even greater potential for engagement with students. Given that theology is the disciplined reflection upon the practice of Christian worship, and given that all human endeavors ought to worship the one true God, my work in a Christian college setting will combine the full character of good professorship with the practice, ancient as Paul's letters to Timothy, of encouraging and mentoring young Christians.