Tilting at Windmills
Written by: Beth Benedix
On a cold, gray Wednesday in February, 1989, Konrad Czynski leapt across Lincoln Hall stage, brandished an imaginary sword at dragons and windmills and dared his undergraduate audience not to care about Don Quixote. This tiny man—the story he was bringing to life— captivated us. It was impossible not to believe that there, in that theater, we were seeing into truth. Pulled in by his enthusiasm and a near-visceral desire for uncynical meaning-making, I went up to him after class and arranged a meeting to talk about majoring in comparative literature. When we met, he introduced me—a second semester freshman—to graduate students and senior faculty. Everyone was friendly, even the faculty members who had been working behind closed office doors came out to say hello when he knocked. At seventeen years old and eight hundred miles from home, I found a refuge in the sprawling, often frightening, world of the University of Illinois. I signed up, got three degrees from the same tiny department, and never looked back.
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For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a teacher. I would spend hours in the “classroom” I’d constructed in our basement teaching “lessons” at the blackboard I’d begged for, grading “assignments” at the lumbering desk we had moved down there to complete the stage setting for the solo performance I put on nearly every day. I had an oversized pair of sunglasses that I propped up on my head as I yelled at the invisible students who weren’t learning anything I was trying to teach them. At six, I modeled my teaching method after the meanest teacher in the school, who I inexplicably worshiped for her meanness. It felt like raw power to me, intoxicating for a six-year-old child of an acrimonious divorce that had taken away whatever semblance of power a six-year-old might have.
It’s curious to me how far from that space of raw power my teaching style diverged, when I was first given the chance to design my own classroom as a teaching assistant in graduate school. Professor Czynski was long-gone from the department at that point. An adjunct, his contagious love of literature and compassionate teaching style were apparently considered extraneous to the more serious business of literary criticism. Overblown as it sounds, I don’t think I ever quite got over his departure. Learning felt markedly different in most of my other classes. It felt judged, mediated, dull. The course I took on existentialism was the most painful, maybe because of the weight of my expectations. Three years earlier, I read Camus’ The Stranger and was ripped to shreds by its clarity and beauty. When I saw the course on the schedule of classes for the upcoming semester, I placed it as first choice on my registration slip, anxious I wouldn’t get in. To my dismay, I did get in, and spent an entire semester fighting against sleep as the professor lectured about meaning and non-meaning and urgency and wrote compound hyphenated neologisms from one end of the board to the other. My boyfriend and I had taken the class together, and every day after class I would unleash my frustration: it wasn’t supposed to be this way! I didn’t know at the time how it should be, but I sensed that it was supposed to be blood and guts, a collective harnessing of our late-adolescent angst into the conviction that we could do something in this world.
“I aspire to create an environment as conducive to learning as Professor Czynski’s.”
When I first started teaching, I held onto my experience of Professor Czynski’s technicolor classes and to the many-shades-of-greyness of the others. They both still serve as potent teaching models, albeit in radically opposed ways. I aspire to create an environment as conducive to learning as Professor Czynski’s. Whereas my nightmare scenario is that my students will feel like I did in that existentialism class. If my students experience my classes as just an academic exercise, I fear I’ve done damage to both my students and the material.
*****
I believe that my students are pursuing their own existential questions and fervently want to learn. The teaching style that I’ve cultivated over twenty-seven years enacts this belief. I’ve also learned to lean into the role of fellow traveler, which feels most authentic to me. In the last eight years or so I have developed strategies to create a classroom culture of maximum engagement, relevance and shared power. As a full professor at an elite liberal arts college, I fully acknowledge that the privilege, autonomy and comparatively miniscule workload I enjoy bears little to no resemblance to the unsustainable conditions that so many K-12 teachers are facing. It is, therefore, with a VERY healthy dose of shame that I offer up these strategies. At the same time, these strategies have been game-changers for me, so I wanted to share just two of them with you, in the hopes that there may be elements you will find useful to adapt to your classrooms. I’m embedding links to current materials to provide more detail. Please feel free to reach out to talk about any of this!
Structuring courses to enable co-designed curriculum and student autonomy:
My courses are generally interdisciplinary, pulling together literature, religious studies and philosophy and are often centered around core themes or constellations of ideas (for instance, “the literature of existentialism,” “the legacy of Nietzsche and Kafka,” “the dangerous art of truth-telling and truth-seeking”). Several years ago, I revamped the course structure to create ample space for students to co-design the curriculum. I choose the material for the first half of the semester, attempting to provide as much coverage as possible. Depending on the topic/theme, the material I choose is with the intention of exposing students to seminal texts and authors (a kind of condensed “Great Books” approach). At the beginning of the second half of the semester, we spend a day mapping out the conceptual space of the first half, accounting for everything we read and looking for persistent questions, patterns, tensions, etc. For the rest of the semester, each student is responsible for leading a class (or part of a class) on new material that they demonstrate is conceptually connected to what we’ve covered.
The in-class conversations are punctuated by the work students are doing independently and collectively outside of class. Students work on scaffolded independent projects in consultation with me aiming to demonstrate a deep wrestling with the material packaged in a way that is meaningful for an audience broader than our classroom. The independent projects form the seedbed for a collaborative event that invites the community into the conceptual space we’ve been traveling in all semester. Events have taken several forms, from a three-day “Existentialpalooza” festival on the quad to an intricate escape room in the (legendarily haunted!) chapel culminating in a noisy midnight re-enactment of Kafka’s The Trial.
Guided self-assessment:
Along with the revamped course structure, the single most important change I’ve made to my classes is the introduction of a guided self-assessment method. I have long struggled with the sense that top-down grading that emphasizes summative over formative assessment is the main obstacle to the kind of impactful learning I want to nurture in my classes. In my head, impactful learning is tied to sharpening intrinsic motivation by pairing it with external validation. In this regard, I’ve found this method to be ideal, because it privileges a strong work ethic, high expectations, honest self-reflection about the quality of the work and complete transparency. At the beginning of the semester, I provide students with a set of guidelines that parses out the expectations for each assignment. For each assignment, there is a series of reflective questions that ask students to gauge their effort, the quality of their work, the intentionality of their process, the risks they took that panned out, the risks they took that didn’t, the questions driving their projects, the questions that still remain. To supplement their reflections (which generally take the form of 8-10 page narrative essays), they have the qualitative feedback that I have given them throughout the semester for each assignment and a suggested quantitative grade for that assignment. In the guidelines, I describe my role in the process like this: “consider me your mirror on the wall/polygraph. I am here to help you see the truth…my role, as I see it, is to nurture your curiosity, provide us with food for thought, help you to shape your ideas into a form that you find relevant and challenging, and be an honest judge of the quality of your work and the level of your mastery of the material. I therefore reserve the right to modify your grade if your assessment differs markedly from my perception of your performance in class.”
“I’ve found this method to be ideal, because it privileges a strong work ethic, high expectations, honest self-reflection about the quality of the work and complete transparency.”
At the end of the day, I’m still the one physically assigning the grades, but I can tell you that, since I’ve adopted this method, the quality of work has been significantly higher. There have only been a handful of occasions when a student has proposed a higher grade than I would have given them. The majority of students are either harder on themselves than I would be or perceive their performance in a way that aligns very much with mine.
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