As a teacher, I aspire to encourage my students to apply the skills they have acquired beyond the context of the classroom. Nonetheless, I believe that the true test of my effectiveness is mirrored in the ability of my students to further develop individualized strategies for examining various forms of social discourse. I am therefore truly successful when my students no longer need my services. I have taught a variety of literature, cultural studies and language courses both at introductory and advanced levels. While I have been required to emphasize different skills and approaches to learning in each of the individual courses I have taught, I typically have a given set of core objectives that influence the manner that I conduct every class. I generally seek to imbue my students with critical tools to dissect and examine different forms of cultural production. In the process I hope not only to instill in my students an awareness of other societies and worldviews but also teach them to reflect on how their own cultural dispositions affect their understanding of foreign texts, media and languages. I therefore encourage my students to critically engage with cultures from different countries as well as various subcultures from within their own society. This critical engagement with different forms of cultural production is not just directed towards external examples that emerge as objects of analysis but also incorporates an examination of instructional materials used in the class, such as textbooks, anthologies and course syllabi. In this way, I hope to make my students reflect on the ways in which the strategies employed to acquire knowledge and skills are themselves the products of certain perspectives and positions that are not neutral.
One of the methods I have employed in literature classes to foster a cultural understanding of texts and issues that may be foreign to students is to highlight similarities between phenomena being discussed in foreign contexts and familiar examples in their own societies when possible (in these instances it is always vital to make the students aware of the limitations of this method). Using this strategy, students may sometimes have a point of departure or entry from which they can engage with the literature being analyzed. For example, when I taught The River Between, a postcolonial novel by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, I attempted to make the students understand one of the central tensions created in the mind of the protagonist when he returns to his native home after spending years in a boarding school run by English missionaries. In this instance, the personal experiences shared by some of the students in the class, who happened to be first generation college students, provided useful insights on the ways in which social institutions of learning can sometimes alienate those being educated from the communities in which they were born. The students were therefore able to relate several vital events described in the novel to the experiences of their own classmates. This comparative analysis provided a point of departure from which they could begin to intricately comprehend the cultural dynamics of colonial education described in the novel. Having taught for many years in Appalachia, I have similarly discussed the stigmatization of Appalachian English—an issue that many of my students are familiar with—as a comparative point of reference that enables the class to begin analyzing the politics of language and cultural imperialism in postcolonial texts.
Analyzing the content of syllabi in literature classes (examining which novels and texts have been included in the syllabus and for what reasons as well as reflecting on materials that have been excluded) also makes students aware of the critical and ideological positions that may be tacitly assumed through carefully selected course materials. While discussing the course syllabus in my world and comparative literature classes, I often encourage my students to engage with the following questions: what types of texts/authors typically circulate in translation? What kinds of works have historically been excluded from these global processes of circulation? What are the national and international cultural politics that dictate these global processes of inclusion and exclusion? How might we remap a study of global literature in a way that incorporates materials that have historically been constrained from traveling, either in translation or through other means, beyond their local origins? What are the benefits of such an endeavor? How would it change some of the existing definitions of world literature? Since world and comparative literature classes are among the dominant spaces in which materials stemming from different national and cultural spaces circulate, the very act of designing a syllabus, a new course proposal or a curriculum emerges as a theoretical response to some of these questions. Indeed, the aggregate conglomeration of world and comparative literature syllabi bear part of the responsibility for opening, subverting, restricting or creating avenues in which texts are disseminated and read on a wide scale. It is henceforth by analyzing the course syllabus that I attempt to introduce many of the debates that permeate the field of comparative literature.
I generally judge the success and failures of the teaching strategies I employ on the quality of the final essays and position papers my students submit after numerous drafts. This gives me the opportunity to reflect on what methods seem to work and which ones need improvement. I have also found it useful to incorporate service learning activities in my world and comparative literature classes. By requiring students to reflect and apply what they have learned in “real world” contexts, service learning gives students an added dimension through which they can personalize and further explore dominant themes that permeate classroom discussions on topics such as race, class, gender, disability, sexual orientation as well as environmental issues. For example, as part of my comparative feminist literature class, many of my students have engaged in various projects sponsored by the university’s Women and Gender Equity Center. Here, the students’ ability to effectively analyze and engage with local problems plaguing women in the community—including domestic abuse, rape, sexual harassment and lack of access to contraception—is tremendously enhanced by the extent to which they are able to grasp many of the theoretical concepts stemming from their readings and class discussions. I believe that one of my central roles as a teacher is to endow my students with the necessary tools to comprehend and critically engage with the world in which they live. My efforts are driven by a social imperative to make my students better enlightened citizens—a quality which, I believe, is vital to the sustainability of any democracy.