 |
Kaja SilvermanClass of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies |
Kaja Silverman, The Class of 1940 Professor of Rhetoric and Film Studies, has been at Berkeley since 1991, and co-founded the Program in Film Studies in 1996. One of the foremost intellectuals in the humanities in the United States, Silverman teaches a wide range of courses from the basic Rhetoric 20 lecture to seminars on more advanced topics, such as “The Hollywood ‘Woman’s Film,’” “National Identity and Cinematic Representation,” and others. The Committee on Teaching noted the large number of in-depth, extensive, and eloquent comments by students in their evaluations of Silverman: “The connecting thread between each new text and lecture was so strong and linear that the final movie was a perfect way to end the class. This class had a point,” said one. And another wrote, “I am walking away from the course with more knowledge, but also new perspectives on myself and the world.” The Committee praised Silverman for developing in students sheer joy and awe at their own ability for extremely complex thinking. That Silverman is “clearly a transformative teacher” was the general consensus of the Committee.
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
In Padre, Padrone, a film by the Taviani brothers, a peasant boy who loves school is dragged out of the classroom by his illiterate father, and forced to herd sheep until he's old enough to enlist in the military. He joins the Army in order to get an education, and the film ends with him happily conjugating Latin verbs.
This film captures what I like to call "the romance of learning”—and that is what I strive to transmit to my undergraduate students. Some of them are already in love with books, movies, music and art when they walk into my classroom, but others don't yet know how thrilling these things can be, and they think of the course material as data to be memorized. It is often difficult to ignite their intellectual passion, but once this happens, they become active learners in all of their courses, and they inhabit the world in a much more capacious way. When this flame first begins to flicker, a student's feelings about a book or a movie generally exceed her capacity to analyze it, but that soon changes, because to be intellectually passionate about something is not just to love it, but also the thoughts it inspires, and the mental faculties it awakens.
I help my undergraduates become passionate about the material I teach by assigning texts that excite me, and by showing them why. I also engage them in group discussions of passages, images, and clips; respond to and build on what they say; encourage them to do the same with each other; and connect the assigned texts to their lives and the world. I help them become passionate about the activity of thinking by bringing every exchange I have with them into extremely sharp focus. I love watching their faces when I press one of them to clarify a point, and it suddenly becomes intelligible. I also encourage my undergraduate students to tell me when they haven't grasped something, praise them when they do, and go over the relevant part of my lecture or the reading again, in several different ways. I spend a lot of time exploring the implications of what we have read or viewed—and when they realize that they can do this with the materials they are studying, many of them can't wait to write their next paper.
Most graduate students don't need to be inducted into the romance of learning, but their knowledge is still quite circumscribed, and many of them haven't yet learned to think in a disciplined way. I try to address both of these problems in my Rhetoric graduate courses by focusing on major thinkers, like Freud, Lacan, and Merleau-Ponty, and discussing their work in a systematic way. I do the same when teaching the required course in film theory, except that we read many thinkers, instead of one. My other graduate courses in film are often more "free-wheeling," since I want to get the students to look at the clips I show them, instead of using an all-too-familiar theoretical text to "unlock" their "meaning." I have also been using these courses to introduce the students to other kind of visual works–paintings, photographs, and video installations.