Glynda Hull
Professor, Graduate School of Education
Glynda Hull, who received her B.A. from Mississippi University for Women and her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh, is co-chair of the Language and Literacy, Society and Culture Area in the Graduate School of Education. Her research interests cover a wide range of topics, from technology and education, to literacy and work, and community education—all of which she writes extensively on. Among her awards, she has twice been honored by College Composition and Communication for best article. The committee was impressed that she practices what she preaches: by providing innovative learning experiences to those learning how to provide learning experiences to others. They also noted that many of her students had won awards in the field. One of her colleagues says "Professor Hull's teaching is an absolute wonder to behold. To visit her classes and seminars is an exercise in amazement. It is an extraordinary pleasure to watch as her undergraduate and graduate students set aside their self-absorption and enter wide-eyed into the play of ideas." She joined the Berkeley faculty in 1987.
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Last October I spent time in India on a project to provide computers for rural schools. With a former UC Berkeley graduate student, Urvashi Sahni, I visited Madantoosi, a tiny village that has no shops or electricity, but whose elementary school now possesses one computer and a set of solar panels to run it. What an amazing thing it was to observe the children's fascination with this new tool and a previously unavailable science curriculum that was being delivered via CD ROM. They sat en masse, facing the machine, listening and watching intently and silently as distant marvels were revealed.
The following week we returned bearing a small gift, a brief movie that we had made on a portable computer. Illustrated with photographs taken of the children and their school on our previous visit, this digital story was narrated by Urvashi in Hindi. Now, this was the truly amazing sight: the children of Madantoosi seeing themselves, their school, their goats, their water pump, their headmaster, their village-in a word, their social and material worlds--on the screen, the object of others' interest, admiration, and desire.
I tell this story because I've come to think of it as a metaphor for my teaching: it reveals who I most strive to be as a teacher—a mentor and guide who attempts to arrange a social, intellectual, and material environment such that students come to see themselves on the screen. By this I mean learning to find one's place as an effective and engaged participant who is able—who is authorized—to take part in a wider scholarly and practical conversation.
I encourage my students to juxtapose their own biographies to the matter of the course, becoming alert to how their experiences diverge from and overlap the lives of those they intend to teach and study. It's not as important, I have found, to announce with finality how one should think, as it is to give students the floor to think and the principles for judging the quality of ideas. I take students' writing seriously and expect the same from them, responding in detail to their prose. I insist that students choose their projects well, never being satisfied with work which fails to capture their imaginations and energy or to demand their whole attention and all of their ability. And I remain respectful of how gradual a thing learning typically is, how developmental, and I stay patient.
My best hope for those I teach-those smart, hard-to-impress, always inquisitive undergraduates and our dedicated and brilliant graduate students-as well as the children and youth I come in contact with through my work in West Oakland and elsewhere-is that they receive the academic and social scaffolding necessary to imagine themselves in a career that will make a mark on their worlds.
