Teaching Careers and Teaching Expertise

Both of these books tell us we could be doing something better: Academic Cultures that we could better prepare college teachers of English and foreign languages for the careers many will have; Learning from Scant Beginnings that we could teach better if we had a more detailed understanding of what enables accomplished teachers to do what they do. As we worry about the damage the economic downturn will do to our institutions and our professional lives, we may not be in a mood to hear about our inadequacies, but these books deserve attention because they deal with matters that, unlike the economy, are actually within our power to do something about.

The volume edited by Sean P. Murphy consists of eighteen essays contributed by faculty who teach or have taught English, composition, or a foreign language at institutions that do not grant PhDs in these areas. In “Since You Didn’t Ask: Reflections on Foreign Language Teaching,” James W. Jones’s account of his experience at MLA conventions captures the impetus behind the volume: “As I walk through the corridors or circulate at receptions, I notice how one attendee after another, especially younger persons (job seekers perhaps) looks first at my name tag, not at me. Having observed this for years, I have learned to interpret their thoughts: ‘Hmm, I’m not sure if he is Somebody. That name is pretty generic. Let me see where he’s from . . . Oh. He’s nobody. Moving on’.” The basis of this dismissal, James explains is that: “We all have degrees from universities that produce PhDs, but we cannot all teach at those institutions, even if our mentors suddenly retired en masse. Yet we are trained for such institutions and often therefore view other colleges and universities as inferior” (52). Essay after essay refers to a sense many have of themselves as failures—or to others’ sense of them as failures—as they take positions at community colleges or four-year “teaching intensive” institutions. The main purpose of the volume is to dispel this sense by making its principal audience, graduate students and the faculty who train them, aware of the range of satisfying careers that exist outside of research universities.

Before turning to the contents of the volume, a couple of reflections about its focus: first, judging from the Notes on Contributors and remarks made within the essays, a number of the contributors are active critics and scholars. Thus, it must be possible for some faculty to maintain this activity in teaching intensive institutions, though how one manages to do so is not a prominent theme of the volume. In fact, my guess is that several contributors have records of publication more substantial than some of my own teachers did at research universities a few decades ago, and this raises the question of whether the sense of difference between types of institutions isn’t in part due to the profession’s ratcheting up of expectations for publication beginning sometime in the 1970s. Second, while faculty at the contributors’ institutions typically teach substantially more courses than faculty at research institutions do, the number of students they are teaching may not always be greater by the same proportion. (At my research institution, for example, faculty teach two courses a semester, but if those are two undergraduate courses, those classes taken together may enroll 90 students.)Thus the amount of time and energy which faculty at the two kinds of institutions devote to their classes—and so the character of their daily experience—may in some cases not be as far apart as it first appears. However, there obviously are significant differences between educational institutions, and the initial sense of under achievement that the contributors report is real, making the volume’s project eminently worth undertaking.

The group of six essays that open the...