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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume VIII, Number 1 |
September 2002 |
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U N I V E R S I T Y O F P I T T S B U R G H |
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Volume VIII, Number 1 |
September 2002 |
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Chancellor's Distinguished
Teaching Award Teaching
at Pitt has been a priceless education for me in lots of ways as I have
learned about the students and learned from the students,” comments
Susan Harris Smith, English. “I love teaching for the same reason that
I love literature—it enables me to see the world in terms of people
and their interactions and their problems.” Smith has witnessed changes in students since beginning to teach here in 1971. “There are fewer first-generation college students. A college education is more widely valued now than it was then, when many were torn between a well-paying, blue-collar job or a white-collar way of life.” A tenet that grounds her teaching is the importance of getting “to know each student as much as possible and to try to build courses around their interests.” Interacting with students constantly reminds Smith that many of them have jobs and complicated home lives. She is impressed that “Many Pitt students really have to struggle for a college education: They are very aware of what it’s costing their parents, or they have their own financial responsibilities. Student diversity is complex here. It’s so easy, when walking into a classroom, to think of students as they are in that moment, but it’s important to remember that I’m dealing with the whole human being who has a complex life. I encourage students to contact me day or night at my office or even at my home.” “Responding to students’ interests and needs stretches me as a teacher and as a person.” As an example of how her students’ unique interests have broadened her own perspective, Smith recalls how she learned about Haitian history and culture as she worked with a Haitian student researching 19th- century periodicals for an American literature class, Emergence of Modern America. Smith’s favorite classes are the smaller ones where she has more opportunity to “get to know each student as much as possible and to try to build the course around their interests as much as possible.” She cherishes the rewards reaped by students and teacher when they have opportunities to interact on an individual level; yet she also appreciates the importance of student discussion and tries to build peer interaction into her classes. For example, in Introduction to Critical Reading, groups of three to four students work closely together, commenting on one another’s work. Smith has taught the gamut of English department courses, from introductory to graduate. However she specializes in drama and finds Contemporary Drama the most exciting course to teach: “I like the way in which the art form of drama humanizes philosophy, making it into a human dilemma. Complicated ideas become accessible to students when they approach them through an art form that is intriguing. Drama engages their interest by focusing on tension and conflict. It’s an exciting class to teach because students have to think about disturbing ideas and problems, such as the capacity of man to wage war and destroy humanity in huge numbers. Drama starts with the particular and extends outward. The plays we read dramatize and problemitize all of our fundamental assumptions about daily life. The plays shake the foundations of everything we take for granted—education, family, politics, religion, even language.”
Smith’s drama students begin this learning process with the first class, when she begins to ask them to question the things they take for granted: “I ask them what they’re doing in school in the first place. They think of themselves as consumers of a product that is education, but I want them to see themselves as a product that comes out of this institution. After four years in this institution, they will have a diploma; I ask them what that means, what it means to be in an institution, moving from class to class as if they are moving from (prison) cell to cell. I ask them why they believe that I’m really Susan Smith, the teacher.” Even her Introduction to Shakespeare course, which attracts students from other disciplines who need to fill a humanities requirement, is exciting to teach. “My objective is for Shakespeare to have a personal meaning for each student by the end of the semester. I ask them, ‘Who is your Shakespeare? The poet? The Renaissance man? A homosexual? A man of the theater?’ I try to create a place pedagogically where every student can make a personal connection and find something of value— not what I’m telling them to value. For example, after reading the first three acts of A Winter’s Tale, a tragicomedy romance, I ask them to think about what’s going to happen, given the way they have learned this genre works. They consider what they know about the way Shakespeare writes plays along with what they personally want or desire to have happen. Their personal desire for narrative, combined with what they have learned in the course, makes them understand that the plot must go a certain way. This has produced very interesting results because they have to analyze themselves as well as the genre. Then, for the final exam, they have to write as if explaining to a best friend why a particular Shakespeare play is their favorite. As they strive for a personal connection and write persuasively, they are in control of everything they’ve learned.”
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| A newsletter devoted to the support of teaching and learning at the University of Pittsburgh |
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| Center
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