In ProfHacker’s prehistory (i.e., during its soft launch), we did a post about “Five Useful Books for (New) Faculty.” They’re all great books–and commenters added several more–but the essay that did the most to settle me down as a teacher is Michael Bérubé’s “Teaching to the Six” (Pedagogy 2.1: 2001. 3-15). When I started as a teacher, it was either frustrating or panic-inducing to think that there were students who didn’t really want to be in the class. I’d frequently design assignments or class discussions so that they’d be pitched at the students who most closely matched my interests, but dimly recognized that that was a little self-centered and elitist. I’d also beat myself up mercilessly if a particular day’s class didn’t grip everyone present.
Bérubé explains the reality of teaching in a reasonably big state school, where some people are necessarily going to care more than others. What’s helpful about the essay is the sane humanity with which he confronts this situation:
Teaching to the six is not nearly so elitist or exclusive as it can be made to appear. It entails nothing more than the realization that for half or more than half of the students in an undergraduate-survey classroom, you are a node in their lives just as they are nodes in yours. It’s just part of the job at large public universities: the things you say and do in such classrooms will be disseminated, in the Derridean sense, in ways you cannot predict or control. I find this exhilarating, challenging, and depressing every semester, and it induces in me a range of intellectual and emotional responses that at once match and intensify the exhilarating, challenging, and depressing experiences that make up the rest of my diurnal life. . . . One signal virtue of teaching undergraduates, then, is that it serves as a powerful reminder that pedagogy should be understood as a means of dissemination rather than a means of reproduction, even–or especially–on those bad days when you are teaching only to the six.
This essay gave me permission to think about the different audiences that exist even within the same classroom, and to think more creatively about the ways in which we all get along (or fail to!) over the course of the semester. It would, after all, be a sadder world if every person in it were a Victorianist with Lacanian sensibilities and a weird predilection for technology. (Who am I kidding? That world would be AWESOME.)
It also helped me to recognize that acknowledging those different audiences isn’t quite the same as pandering, or dumbing down the material, and that failing to respond to my teaching isn’t exactly the same thing as wholesale academic indifference. It has, in short, made me a *much* better teacher of gen ed courses.
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2 Responses to Berube’s “Teaching to the Six”
Nels P. Highberg - February 22, 2010 at 5:22 pm
That’s one of those essays I reread every few months. It really helps ground me.
Lisa Maruca - February 23, 2010 at 11:01 am
Despite Berube’s disclaimers, a do find the notion of “teaching to the six” (which many of my colleagues share) to be both depressing, defeatist and yes, elitist. Though I also teach literature and writing, and at a lower-tier state university than he does (also Research 1 but with an urban, working class undergrad population), my attitude towards who I reach and what I might be teaching them is quite different. Perhaps this is because I don’t take a content-centered approach and I have no illusions that the world needs many more literary critics. Rather, I try to find out the state of each of my student’s skills, knowledge and ambitions and move them along their personal continuum. I might introduce Student A (one of Berube’s six) to some theorist that will help her reframe her quite sophisticated work, but Student C–in our classes, often a future secondary school English teacher–deserves my equal attention as s/he struggles to understand how to read an eighteenth-century poet. Even Student D can pick up some basic research and writing skills–yes, he should have them already, but if he doesn’t…no time like the present!
I am more in line with Berube’s realism about success, however–which I think this ProfHacker column is responding to, in ways that seem more generously all-encompassing than Berube. I try to offer all my students a buffet of skills, content, approaches, methods, etc–something for most everyone (not just the six). I revise that buffet each semester–indeed, from class to class and week to week–to reach the widest group possible. But ultimately it’s up to each individual student to do the work and choose to learn. I can attempt to inspire their curiosity, but I can’t force it.