Statement of Philosophy

Statement of Philosophy:

Students regard a university course as a chance to check something off of their lists, thinking: “Now I have this requirement satisfied” or “now I know what the Enlightenment is.”   In this paradigm, the student pulls into the course like a truck expecting to load up whatever the professor says and then to unload the requisite information at another place in the semester, usually on a test.  Many professors (and especially administrators) love this kind of learning, for it means that there is a one way flow of information from one professor to as many students as can be packed into a hall.  They absorb the information from her or him, swish it around in their brains a little, then go to the testing center to carefully reconstruct the professor’s thoughts and opinions as closely as possible.  The students then have something, all the material has been covered, imparted, downloaded. 

This  course is quite different.

I myself pulled up at the info stations in many classes during my career, trying as hard as I could to amass an “Education,” a large collection of facts and familiarities.   Some of my professors, however, just would not cooperate in this system of accumulation.  I would pull up in their courses and they would look at my empty truck and say “So, what have you brought to the course?” I thought maybe that I was not prepared enough to receive the load of learning, maybe I had not read enough of the background assignment or something.  I was missing the point.  They were not there to give me anything, but to help me to learn the long process of education.  Instead of standing at the podium and loading me up, they stood beside me and asked “so what are you going to do?” This frustrated me, after all, what were they there for except to fill my empty bottle with education?  Gradually, I learned to appreciate and admire these professors who were more than dispensers of wisdom—they were guides, confidants, nay-sayers, problem-makers and prodders who would not just let me sit and be filled.  I had to learn a new kind of education, one much more like exploration than commercial trucking.  The “education” was no longer sitting in neatly wrapped pallets to be loaded into my mind, the professors gave me some maps and a pat on the back and said: “there is the world, go and learn.” I will never forget one afternoon after one of these classes when I was so intrigued and disturbed by what a professor had asked that I trekked over to the library and found every book on the subject and spent two days doing nothing but reading and photocopying.  I returned to class and told the professor that he had to give me twenty minutes so that I could talk about what I had found.  He recognized that this was a profound moment in my education, and he sat at the back of the class while I tried to explain what I had found.  That day, I learned more than the rudiments of the subject at hand, I had finally learned how to learn.  I will be forever grateful to him for not giving me the answers, not lecturing and asking me to repeat his thoughts, but for turning me loose and requiring me to set out on the journey that leads to education. I learned Education is not something you have, but something you are—you are a searcher, a sponge, a thinker, always restless and in need of something else out there beyond the bend.  And, I learned that education does not end with the dumping of facts upon the final exam, but it is a process that continues as interruptions, interests and questions that last a whole life long

If you want to learn this way with me, let me step down from the pulpit and turn things over to you. This is how I want to teach German 330.  If you want to be filled with a nicely balanced and well-packaged set of information, there are other courses for you on campus.  If you want to enter with me into the confusing, contradictory and tangled process of learning about cultural history, then welcome aboard.  Our goal: to get to know the messy process of negotiating historical and cultural meaning.  By the end, you will be a well-trained explorer, and when asked for an inventory of what you have learned, you may have to shrug and say “I can’t show you much.” The end product is you: you will possess skills, interests, and the ability to question and analyze.  It’s hard to see, but it sticks with you more than any list of facts. Instead of having an education, you are an education.  Or at least that’s one way of seeing it.