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Kevis GoodmanAssociate Professor, English |
[The 2005 DTA video is available.]
Goodman regularly offers courses covering a wide variety of literature, from Chaucer through the Romantics. She has tackled the difficult survey course English 45A, required of majors, and has given the course a new reputation for excellence; she has "brought Milton alive for English majors"; she has developed a course on "Elegy, Mourning, and the Holocaust," which moves beyond her usual fields to include Twentieth Century texts and contexts. Her book Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History was published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press. Goodman received the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentorship of Graduate Student Instructors in 2004. Goodman has been a member of the Berkeley faculty since 1997.
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Speaking in Eden to Eve, the still-unfallen Adam of John Milton's Paradise Lost remarks (more than once) that the only thing the first couple must remember is this "easy charge": of all the many fruitful trees in Paradise, there is just one whose food they may not eat:
. . . that Tree
Of Knowledge, planted by the Tree of Life,
So near grows Death to Life, whate'er Death is,
Some dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou know'st
God hath pronounc't it death to taste that Tree . . .
In some of my worse nightmares, my students nicely repeat, with unerring accuracy, just what they have heard in my lectures or seminars—and then add to each other, ". . . whatever that is, some Important Thing no doubt"! Such rote knowledge (knowing about, moving around the perimeters of understanding by virtue of diligent memorization) is precisely the kind of knowing I seek to avoid in my students, as well as in myself. The seventeenth-century Milton is thus important to my teaching not simply because I often teach Paradise Lost but because he intuits that what postlapsarian Adam and Eve acquire is not knowledge per se (indeed, they are remarkable compendiums of information, duly recited, in Eden); they gain instead a new relationship to what they know. Knowledge must become fully inhabited or, to cite one of Milton's keywords, "experienced."
In the seventeenth century, "experience" and "experiment" were still synonyms. Accordingly I consider each class as a group experiment, and this can be true in lectures of over a hundred no less than in intimate seminars. My task is in part to make students recognize the difference between the Right Answer (don't eat; eat) and knowing well, where the second is a process that may be slow or circuitous but is surely more enduring. My classes therefore follow a line of inquiry; they try to enact the kind of unfolding argument that I hope participants can bring to their own literary analyses. The unfolding itself, the arc of interpretation, counts as much as the particular outcome of the argument, the big claim. I am more interested in modeling the use of textual evidence, the search for insight-bearing contradiction, the passage beyond paraphrase, and the uses or abuses of contextual explanation, than I am intent on telling them what to think. Milton's God tried that. It did not help.
If I can be successful, then, a student will exit the room feeling not that she or he has been lectured at but somehow talked and thought with. Yet there is nothing offhand or informal about this intellectual midwifery. Successful experiments take lots of preparation, and I prepare for hours. I do so not in order for matters to follow my well-wrought plan but rather to have the confidence and the courage to ditch the plan altogether, if necessary, especially in the face of boredom, bafflement, or humorous indifference, and to forge an alternate path. In other words, I prepare not so that I can control the unpredictability of student response but so that I can use and enjoy it freely. I do not try to hide my own hard work from my students in order to display the kind of brilliant or glamorous virtuosity that seems to come quickly and spontaneously; even if that were possible, I think it would not be desirable. I take my own work and preparation to be a necessary half of the bargain I am asking the rest of the class to enter into for the semester. Why should students try hard, and then harder, if their teacher is not doing the same, with passion and (this is so important) pleasure? I take my work to be just a token of respect, both for who they now are and where they can go—which is always further.
I teach large lectures and small seminars, but I want, even against the odds, for my students to feel that the class has been intimate whether there are 8 or 128 other students in the room. Electronic technology has, of course, made possible remarkable kinds of virtual immediacy, and it has been helpful to explore its possibilities, but I am not quite ready to give up on real immediacy and real time. So far, I have found no substitute for meeting with every student in the class, and that more than once. I think I am notorious in the dorms and beyond for requiring, year after year, that all enrolled students in my version of our large gateway introduction to the English Major come individually to recite and discuss the first 18 lines of The Canterbury Tales during the first week or two of class. In part I am doing it because I know that it will make their own silent reading of Chaucer's fourteenth-century English less alienating in the coming weeks, but if that fails (it usually doesn't), then at least I know that by the next class I may seem less alien.
Individual tutorials on writing are critical, in part for the same reason. While students may write on the same texts or topics, everyone has their own habits of combining words and connecting ideas, and these fascinate in their particularity. Sitting down and getting elbow-deep, as it were, in a student's prose by outlining paragraphs and reshaping representative sentences has the second advantage, too, of illuminating the density and power of that medium we work in, like the authors we read. Before students can be "clear writers," they must come to appreciate that language itself is neither transparent nor indifferent. Words are not just conveyors of things but things in their own right, possessors of their own efficacy. Difficult literature can be our great friend for that reason, I try to suggest, for it holds forth its thingliness and makes us grapple with its ways and means, the many ways it can mean.
And once students realize that, of course, they will also be better readers, more skilled in the reading of signs than Adam and Eve, happy though those two might have been—unknowingly—in Paradise.