At the Museum of Natural Theory: The Experiential Syllabus (or, What Happens When Students Act Like Professors)

It is what students do, not what teachers do, that determines learning outcomes.

—Mary B. Eberly, Sarah E. Newton, and Robert A. Wiggins, "The Syllabus as a Tool for Student-Centered Learning"

Most teachers learn to treat subject matter apart from pedagogy, assuming that the modes of teaching are unrelated to the material to be taught. . . . But if all language "must appear in genres" [Bleich 2001: 126], if there is no language outside of language in use, then there is no subject for a course outside of its enactments in the pedagogy we embrace.

—Scott Stevens, "The Better Part of Pedagogy"

In her contribution to the Pedagogy symposium on Gerald Graff's "teaching the conflicts," Robin Valenza (2003: 255) remembers her childhood visits to New York's Museum of Natural History as a "series of fusty Victorian caves . . . duly labeled with kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, with little more explanation or inspiration." But in 1999, Valenza found that the museum had been "not only physically but conceptually remodeled," describing changes in scientific paradigms and providing "competing hypotheses" (256). In short, the museum was now teaching the conflicts. Even so, Valenza observes, museum visitors still remain, like students in many literature courses, spectators rather than participants. While one can teach about scientific or literary-theoretical differences, it seems harder to invite students to do theory by adjudicating these differences meaningfully for themselves. Valenza laments that "students are kept in boarded-up Victorian caves instead of given a window onto a brighter, livelier outside world of deliberation and debate" (258, emphasis added); thus we need to "make changes so that our students can, after taking a literature course, explain what literature professors do and why it is important" (259). This window metaphor captures the essential problem: students here remain witnesses to, rather than actors in, that "world of deliberation and debate." Too often, both museums and classrooms fail to provide the interactive exhibits that would make participants of spectators, allowing them to run their hands over the contours of knowledge production.

I happened to attend the earlier Modern Language Association session, "Conflicts, Culture Wars, and Curricula" (2001), upon which the Pedagogy symposium was based. As I listened to Valenza's call on that occasion for "a pedagogy that invites our students to participate in the profession," I realized that I had just issued such an invitation quite literally. At that time I was a graduate student in a quandary familiar to adjuncts in general: hired late in the season to teach an introductory "gateway to the major" course, I needed to produce a syllabus on the fly. As I fretted over my course design, I had an epiphany: Why shouldn't students feel my pain? Why couldn't they experience the deliberative operations behind the syllabus for themselves? For me, the difficulties of course design are byproducts of the fictions of coverage and representation, which obscure not only the impossibility of the cultural "equality of representation" syllabus (Jay 1997: 157) but also the problem of representing the profession itself (see Culler 2003). Whatever I might say, students will experience my course synecdochically, as the one standing in for the many. If the field's connective tissue remains elusive to its most advanced practitioners, we can only imagine how it looks to students. As Graff has long argued, the curriculum (and not only within English) provides little integrative space where students can make intellectual connections. Instead, the "field coverage" and "add-on" principles allow diverse areas of study to exist in a disarticulated relationship (Graff 1987: 9). How do we convey that each of us provides one idiosyncratic view of a heterogeneous profession and its objects of study? Courses at the introductory level carry a particularly weighty burden given the amalgamation of intellectual concerns that literary and cultural studies has become. How...