Reading as Teaching

October 21, 2007

A few things this week have made me think about teaching.. that is, how I go about doing it.

If I had my choice, teaching would resemble a never ending reading group. The most exciting part is listening to how students take to a text and then asking questions that make them reflect upon the experience of reading that text. These reading groups, in my ideal scenario, would not center around books that I know well, but would involve reading texts I have never read. My role as teacher would not be that of all-knowing expert with every detail at hand, rather that of a fine reader.. someone who has learned numerous patterned approaches to talking and thinking about texts.

This is not actually how teaching at a college works. Students have to sign up for courses.. and those courses have titles.. and since I teach (or will) these courses year after year I will develop a body of texts that I think work well for a particular course. A recent realization of mine is that although part of me would rather be reading something new, it is also a privilege to read or watch certain texts over and over. Teaching thus builds a healthy familiarity with texts.. and these are hopefully rich enough that on every return I have occasion to think a little differently about them. Teaching is the one profession I can think of which has this textual return as part of its necessary rhythm.

So now I have set out two contraries: 1) my ideal to teach as an explorer of new texts, and 2) my sense that returning to the same books is part of the actual work of teaching. The format of college pushes me pretty strongly toward #2, but at the same time I try to maintain a sense of myself as a co-reader. It may just be a personality trait, but the more I feel like I know a text completely, the more I feel bored with it.. and that ends up being communicated to students.. I am sure.

This year in Islam I open each class with 20-30 minutes of framing lecture. Mostly this comes from a conviction that Islamic primary texts are difficult to penetrate without some sort of background. But this does not mean I have abandoned my underlying sense of how learning takes place: through encountering something for oneself and figuring out how to solve the attendant problems. For example, I could stand in front of a class and list specialized vocabulary that they might run into while reading Islamic texts. But I doubt this information would stick. On the other hand one can read primary texts and by repetition, by context, and by asking for help, slowly grasp the terms of discourse and the underlying value assumptions. Learning comes through reading.. and allowing for mysteries that will only be solved later.

So let me just say: what I teach is reading. I teach the subject of Islam and religion more broadly, but my method is to let my subject arise from primary texts. That, at least, is how I am most comfortable. Learning how to read cannot be explained from in front of the class, but can only be modeled. It is a set of questions and angles of approach. That means I am never going to let myself get too far away from open discussion.

When I look back on the professors who have most influenced me, they are the ones who taught me how to look at texts differently.. who had a certain eye for details and oddities. I want to make sure that this marks my own teaching.