Teaching Statement
Meegan Kennedy
Florida State University
Teaching is like what I imagine surfing to be, balancing constantly, delicately, wary of losing the momentum on which I ride. Some days I come to class unsure if I can muster the focus to do it well: listen to a student, ask her to clarify her terms, check my list of questions, glance encouragingly at a quiet student, work out the segue to my next major focus, guide students in close-reading a passage, cue a long-talker that he needs to wind up his comments, relate what he's said to a previous question, help students find parallels in previous texts, and foreshadow next week's class. On the good days it feels effortless; on other days, it reminds me that teaching is hard work. But I always leave the classroom feeling buoyed by the energies of my students.
What is my goal as a teacher? Most practically, it is to urge my students to work through a text rather than just passively reading it. I have noticed, and pedagogical studies confirm, that we learn best by engaging with a text - talking about it, writing about it, teaching it. Thus the best I can do for my students is to create a space in which they are instrumental in shaping their own learning; in which, with clear but not dominating guidance, they work through a novel by weaving intense discussions, writing rigorous essays, and constructing thought-provoking presentations in response to it. In my experience, preparation as well as spontaneity ground a successful class. I come with a mini-lecture to provide historical and critical context, a list of guiding questions with page numbers for supporting passages in the text, and two or three major concepts for our focus. And since all my students must write a brief response to the reading each week, I know that each student has at least one original comment to contribute. The extra time I spend in grading these pays off when better-prepared students make discussions livelier and more thoughtful. I often ask my students to share these responses on a secure online discussion board or email listserv, to help them see and respond to each other as intellectual colleagues. And since I always encourage rewrites on longer papers, in courses at every level, my students learn to see writing and critical thinking as a continuing process integral to learning, rather than a finite task to complete and dismiss.
My research interest in the history of the novel allows me to help students situate texts within the varied literary tradition. For example, to teach Tennyson's Idylls of the King , I familiarize students with the historicizing impulse of eighteenth-century antiquarian texts like Thomas Percy's Relics of Ancient English Poetry . I help students see the dialogue between Austen's Sense and Sensibility and the eighteenth-century novel. And to discuss the development of free indirect discourse in nineteenth-century fiction, for example, I asked students to read excerpts from Samuel Richardson's epistolary fiction a century earlier to consider the different ways narrators "ventriloquize" characters' thoughts. Even students unfamiliar with much of the literary tradition can benefit from an exercise in comparative close reading using excerpts from the texts, if carefully framed and contextualized.
Because I study Victorian culture as well as literature, I also enjoy using contemporary "nonliterary" texts to frame a novel, poem, or essay - to locate it as a cultural as well as a literary document, and to suggest a point of entry into discussion and close reading. I might bring John Thomson's 1877 photographs of London street figures into class, for example, and ask students to compare Thomson's images with Cruikshank's illustrations to some of Dickens's sketches of London, as a way of opening up the question of Dickens's narrative voice in these sketches. The structure of the Program in History and Literature allows me to indulge my preference for comparative, interdisciplinary work combined with period focus. Students' weekly response papers often require both close readings and archival research in contemporary documents. For example, this fall my students examined articles in the eighteenth-century journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society to understand more about the culture of exploration and experiment that Swift mocks in Gulliver's Travels . Our discussion of the delicate textual balance of formal choices, generic imperatives, historical contexts, and canonical traditions speaks to students' perceptions of their own lives as negotiations between skill and luck, history and culture.
My research in the field of literature and medicine, and my experience in archival research, also inform my teaching. For instance, reading cases of tropical elephantiasis in The Lancet from the mid-to-late nineteenth century will help students find a way into novels from Dickens's Old Curiosity Shop , with its fascination with the grotesque body, to Kipling's Kim , with its orientalizing interest in Indian disease and treatment. In general, I press students to make connections between literature and culture, to tease out how cultural tensions get staged on a literary plane, without losing sight of the words on the page. Paradoxically, once I engage students with these "outside" perspectives, students read their assignment more closely, perhaps because the supplemental texts offer them a rubric in relation to which they can now locate their careful readings of the literary text.
The range of students in most classrooms makes the teacher's task sometimes difficult, sometimes exhilarating, but never boring. I remember the bright, incisive sophomore hungry for any book I suggested; the fidgety girl whose learning difficulties left her struggling to keep up in class; the wired intellectual who peppered me with emails; the capable Haitian student who had to interrupt her education to help manage a family in crisis; the sensitive pre-med student with a knack for insightful readings; the shy boy, first in his family to attend college, and taken aback by the seeming confidence of his peers; the two first-years who called me up four years later to invite me to lunch as a thanks for inspiring them to become English majors and, now, graduate students in English.
"Inspiration" is a daunting and not always achievable goal. In our pre-professional culture and our anxious economy, it may not seem a practical one. But I can still hear the voice of one of my undergraduate professors, Michael Cooke, reading out with an almost frightening intensity the words of Walter Pater - "Only be sure that it is passion." A passion for words, for ideas, for argument is not easily roused - nor readily controlled, as Pater's contemporaries, critical of his "irresponsible" idealism, warned. But it is what I dream that my students will find in themselves. If my students remember my class fondly, I hope it will be because I succeeded in creating a place where students educated each other: by challenging one another to truly critical thinking, by forming the habit of actively engaging with the texts and the world around them, and by entering into that passionate, questioning dialogue which alone founds a lifelong education.