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  • If I Don’t Know What I’m Teaching, How Can I Make the Best of It?
  • Adam Pacton (bio)
Teaching What You Don’t Know. By Therese Huston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.

When I first began teaching, I had a recurring nightmare. I would be led to the front of a packed lecture hall, handed an unrecognizable text from a different discipline, and told by my smiling chair, “Teach.” I would object that I did not know what I was teaching, to which she would reply, “It’s all part of the job.” Teaching What You Don’t Know, by Therese Huston, addresses what may seem to some the Kafkaesque practice of teaching outside one’s area of expertise. She shows that rather than being a surreal nightmare, teaching outside one’s specialization can be professionally and personally rewarding.

Huston argues that many academics comfortably and confidently teach outside their areas of expertise every day. Increasing disciplinary, economic, and institutional pressures are pushing professors into ever more focused specialties while concurrently requiring them to teach more general classes. This can leave otherwise gifted scholars feeling anxious, under-qualified, undervalued, and unsure of their futures and identities within their departments and disciplines. Huston elegantly parses the reasons for this practice, including the accepted, yet often glossed, disconnect between the almost idiosyncratic specialization that graduate school and profession-alization [End Page 187] require and the more general pedagogical flexibility that today’s classroom demands (13–15, 17–18).

Citing the National Center for Educational Statistics, Huston shows that of 116,000 new professor hires between 2003 and 2005, 84 percent were for non-tenure-track positions (16, 276–77). These instructors will have little choice over teaching assignments as senior faculty hold onto their preferred classes (16–17), and top-down initiatives aimed at increasing accountability may result in situations where these new professors are being told not only what to teach but how to teach it (18–21, 278). Is this trend disturbing? Certainly. Is it startling? Not really. We may not be familiar with the numbers, but we are all too familiar with these practices. Huston does not dwell on establishing the fact that almost every academic will eventually teach outside his or her area of expertise, nor does she focus on the fact that this practice is increasing and will continue to increase. Instead, she focuses on how the practice has become the proverbial elephant in the room and how the need to maintain professional credibility creates a culture of silence on this issue (237). Huston’s book is an attempt to constructively break this silence: “If teaching what you don’t know is a reality of academia in the twenty-first century, then we need a language to discuss this predicament and permission to ask for support” (25). Throughout Teaching What You Don’t Know, Huston provides such a language and shows not only how to ask for support but also how to create the ground where such support is possible but not wholly necessary.

Huston acknowledges that content experts (as distinguished from content novices) often have an easier time teaching within their subject areas. She also shows how teaching on the periphery of one’s comfort zone can accrue clear benefits for both instructors and students. Some of the advantages for the instructor include learning something new and exciting, fostering relationships with faculty who are experts in other content areas, and even broadening one’s vitae (31–34). Indeed, content novices bring a number of pedagogical strengths to the classroom, such as having more realistic expectations, offering concrete explanations, and fostering deep (as opposed to surface) learning (45–55). Huston provides the means to capitalize on these benefits by offering practical suggestions on how to approach courses outside one’s area of expertise in both course planning and execution stages.

The most effective method for approaching unfamiliar course design is to “work backward.” The instructor should determine what “big questions” (or outcomes) he or she wants students to be acquainted with and then plan activities and assignments that have the best chance of producing these [End Page 188] outcomes. This outcomes-based model should...

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