pedagogical acts
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Pedagogical ActsJessica Wells CantielloPublished online: 11 Dec 2009.
To cite this article: Jessica Wells Cantiello (2009) Pedagogical Acts, Prose Studies: History, Theory,Criticism, 31:3, 190-201, DOI: 10.1080/01440350903437999
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Jessica Wells Cantiello
PEDAGOGICAL ACTS
Teaching and Learning in Jane Tompkins’
A Life in School and Alice Kaplan’s French
Lessons
This article argues that academic autobiographies should be viewed through the lens ofpedagogy, and applies this new perspective to texts by Jane Tompkins and Alice Kaplan.In different ways, these two texts illustrate the relational nature of teaching, the way inwhich interactions with students shape a teacher’s practice and demonstrate that the writingof a teaching autobiography, like teaching itself, is a many-layered, collaborative process.By highlighting the textual sites in which students enter into the autobiographies, I showthat although Kaplan and Tompkins disclose very little about their students as individuals,their students are integral components of their attempts to make meaning of the act ofteaching by writing the teacher’s life. Furthermore, I suggest that the devaluation ofteaching in academia allows these authors to take risks and admit failure in their depictionsof teaching.
Keywords autobiography; teacher memoir; Alice Kaplan; Jane Tompkins;education
The American memoir boom of the mid-1990s inspired a resurgence of the sub-genreof the teacher memoir, the story of a teacher’s life, told either in fragments (stories ofthe trying first year abound) or as autobiographical descriptions of Bildung thatculminate in a teaching career. Although certainly not new,1 their re-emergencecoincided with, or in some cases was slightly pre-dated by, the publication of a numberof academic autobiographies, including Nancy K. Miller’s Getting Personal (1991), AliceKaplan’s French Lessons (1993), Jill Ker Conway’s True North (1994), and JaneTompkins’ A Life In School (1996). There are a number of possible reasons for thepublication of these academic texts in quick succession: the nascent memoir market,the authors’ desires to record their part in the history of feminism, a critical turntoward personal criticism, inaugurated by Miller and others.2 However, what manycritics forget in reading these autobiographies is that as most academics trace theirintellectual histories, personal memories, and institutional experiences, they are alsotracing an interrelated narrative, that of their coming into teaching. These academicautobiographies, then, are also teacher memoirs that discuss the authors’ relationaldevelopment as teachers, through anecdotes regarding specific students and colleagues,descriptions of teaching practice, and/or their remembered experiences as the ultimate
Prose Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 December 2009, pp. 190-201
ISSN 0144-0357 print/ISSN 1743-9426 online q 2009 Taylor & Francis
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/01440350903437999
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academic hybrid, the graduate student, who is both a teacher/student and a student-teacher. At first glance some academic autobiographies may seem to simply depict thetrajectory from student to teacher, or what Thomas Austenfeld calls in his article in thisvolume, the “transition from the ‘learning I’ to the ‘teaching I.’” (181) However, anexamination of two of these texts in particular, A Life in School and French Lessons,illustrates the constant interplay between teaching and learning and the overlappingidentities of “student” and “teacher” within the body of the teacher, the institution ofthe academy, and the culture of American higher education.
Some of the difficulty in seeing academic autobiography as teacher memoir, andperhaps also of writing it as teacher memoir, comes from the multiple roles of theacademic, who is not only teacher, but also advisor, writer, researcher, scholar andcommittee member (to name just a few of her multiple roles). As Tompkins notes,often times teaching is viewed as “our load,” while research is “our work” (187). Thesystem at many universities, like Conway’s University of Toronto, that requires lessand less teaching as faculty (ostensibly) become more and more skilled and seniorencourages the perspective of teaching as secondary to the work of the scholar.Furthermore, as each of these authors’ experiences in higher education illustrate, whilewomen have long been the majority of primary school teachers, they were the minorityat university, so for some readers the extraordinary thing about these women is nottheir “conventional” role as teacher, but rather their success in graduate school, theirachievements in writing and research, their ability to break open the class ceiling of theivory tower.
Interestingly, both authors decided to go to graduate school in order to teachcollege. Teaching was the impetus for the other achievements because teaching is thepart of academia that people outside of it know about. As women making careerdecisions, both Miller and Tompkins saw college teaching as one step above teachinghigh school, rather than what Miller now refers to as “the Profession.” Thus, in each ofthese texts, teaching is an integral aspect of the writer’s self-representation. Tompkinssubtitles her text, “what the teacher learned,” identifying herself front and center as theteacher. Kaplan, by way of introduction (on page 13) declares “Today I am a Frenchteacher.” Conway, whose text is perhaps the least explicitly about teaching, asserts thatduring her first position as a tutor at Harvard she was “most excited by what [she] wasteaching than anything else [she] had yet undertaken in [her] academic life” (45).Perhaps Miller’s clever title of her essay in Getting Personal says it best: “TeachingAutobiography” is both about a course in which students read and wroteautobiographies, and it is also a story about her teaching – her teaching autobiography.
Miller’s title also alludes to a telling linguistic trend in the academy. Every fall andspring one hears it in the elevators and the hallways. “What are you teaching thissemester?” We answer: Chaucer or Shakespeare, Gatsby or Beloved, Autobiography orthe Novel. In talking about teaching, our shorthand erases the obvious: that we don’tteach authors, or texts, or genres, we teach students. Stories of teaching are thus bynecessity relational, as the experience of the teacher both molds, and is molded by, theexperiences of her students. As Mitzi Myers notes in her analysis of pedagogy as self-expression in Mary Wollstonecraft’s texts, teaching and autobiography are intimatelyrelated; there is a “fruitful alliance between teaching (the modeling of others) and[autobiography,] the molding of self” (194). Indeed, Jean Jacques Rousseau, one of thefounding fathers of autobiography, crafted both foundational autobiographical and
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pedagogical treatises. Teacher memoirs provide a rich site for theorizing the majortensions of autobiography proper, the role of the self versus the other and therelationship between the individual and the collective, because these tensions arecentral to pedagogy itself.
Since Mary Mason’s germinal essay “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of WomenWriters” in James Olney’s seminal collection of autobiography theory, scholars haveacknowledged the ways in which self representation, especially by women, is performedthrough a grounding of that identity in relation to a chosen other (210). While teachermemoirists oftentimes follow this model by choosing a family member or spouse as theirsignificant other in terms of self-definition, in any recollection of teaching students alsoserve as the significant others for the author. Furthermore, the variety of selves evidentthroughout each of these texts is linked to the process of teaching and learning, as theauthors depict themselves through various stages in their careers and through fluctuatingpositions as students and teachers. As G. Thomas Couser notes, “it is now a criticalcommonplace that all autobiography is necessarily heterobiography as well because onecan rarely if ever represent one’s self without representing others” (x). However, asCouser goes on to explain, certain autobiographies are more concerned with others thanothers, specifically those that represent what he deems “vulnerable subjects.” While Iwould argue that college students are less vulnerable than students represented inautobiographies of grade school teachers, the relationship between any students andteachers fits into Couser’s category of “quasi-professional relationships that involvetrust” (xii). To borrow a term that Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck use in a differentcontext, teacher memoirs are “radically relational” (9) because a teacher’s experience(and success) in the classroom depends on both herself and on the students, just as astudent’s experience (and success) depends on the teacher and well as herself. In orderto represent the teacher’s life, the memoirist must in some way address the interactionswith, reactions to, and relationships with students.
At the same time, the teacher’s story is just that, a single story that tells oneperspective of the classroom experience. Teacher memoirs complicate the question ofwhether or not the individual autobiography (the story of the teacher) can be viewed asa representative of a collective experience (what happens in a classroom). While thisquestion illustrates the need for the recognition of differences within a group,particularly a group that has already been marginalized or disenfranchised, framingindividual experience as somewhat representative has allowed some autobiographies tobe used as witness testimonies.3 Teachers, like all memoirists, belong to a number ofcollectives, one of which is the actual class they are teaching, even as they are not anordinary member because of their unique role as teacher and the power dynamics ofthe classroom. As much as these academic autobiographers situate themselves aslifelong learners and are sometimes even directly taught by their students, the factremains that while they are the ones with access to the means to publicize the story,they are perhaps the least prepared to tell a collective story of a classroom, as theylikely have the most distinctive experience of that room, because of their singularposition of power. As Bill Ayers notes in his memoir/handbook To Teach, “the truth isthere are thirty different stories and the teacher knows one” (18). The teacher emergesas an individual shaped by and representing an experience that could not have happenedwithout the presence and action of the students; what happens in the classroom isinevitably intersubjective, but the teacher, because of his/her unique position in that
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room is unable to tell the whole story. Thus, in reading about teaching, one mustalways ask, where are the students? In these academic autobiographies, the students arethere in different ways – anonymous or named, individualized or grouped together, inthe memories of the teachers who used to be students (from grade school to gradschool), and in the experiences of the teachers who are still learning.
Jane Tompkins’ A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned provides the paradigm foran analysis of teaching and learning in academic autobiography because Tompkinsforefronts her position as teacher and provides a type of pedagogical model forexperimental teaching. The text is part childhood memoir, part love story, partmanifesto and, like most contemporary teacher memoirs, it levies a critique of theeducational system at the same time that it takes the reader inside it. Because Tompkinswrites of a complete life in school, starting with her kindergarten self and ending withher self as a Professor of Literature at Duke University, the reader sees shadows of thechild/student within the adult/teacher.4 Tompkins writes of her anxiety aboutschooling, an anxiety that made itself known by constant urges to go to bathroom allthrough elementary school and which culminated in her wetting her pants while givinga book report in sixth grade (A Life in School 14). She found relief in the Girl’s Room, “arespite from the Inquisition of the classroom” (A Life in School 14). Later, the same urgerepresents her anxiety about teaching, as she recounts the torture of commuting toConnecticut College, always having to go to the bathroom and upon arrival dashing tothe ladies’ room in the English department building (A Life in School 87).5 ForTompkins, being the good student and the good teacher are both performances riddledwith a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration, but the danger lies in her students beingable to see through the teacher to the humiliated sixth grader underneath.
Although her own experiences of teaching are central to Tompkins’ ideologicalproject because she needs to provide examples of what she means by “no-frillsteaching,” “teaching nothing” and engaging the whole student, Tompkins’ specificreminiscences of teaching are curiously mired in the language of doubt and anacknowledgement of the instability of memory. Early on in her discussions of herteaching, Tompkins admits “I don’t know what I was like as a teacher and I don’t knowwhat happened in my classes – the intensity of being in the spotlight produced a kind ofamnesia – but the feeling was like being a horse with a bit in its teeth” (A Life in School88). Here, Tompkins, a memoirist, admits to having a “kind of amnesia” whichimmediately brings the autobiographical pact into question. The metaphors thatTompkins uses to describe her first year – the classroom as stage and her as a horse –focus the attention squarely on her as teacher. In the spotlight one cannot see theaudience of students, and her image of the horse suggests a blurring of everything; sheis driven not by her students but by her own singleness of purpose. This amnesia seemsto come from not knowing how her students see her. Her isolation in the classroommeans she cannot even tell her own story because it is so dependent on theirexperiences of it. In the next paragraph, she jumps to the end of her second year ofteaching, providing brief descriptions of named students – her students have finallyentered the text and she seems able to slow down and see herself as a teacher, albeitone that embarrasses her current self as she narrates it.
Tompkins’ characterization of herself as a horse with a bit in its teeth echoes laterin the text when she details “the best course [she] ever taught,” a class whose twofoundational texts were Moby Dick and Beloved (A Life in School 162). The image of the
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bit plays a central role in Morrison’s text, as Paul D. and Sethe remember thehumiliation and pain of being forced to wear the iron bit in their mouths under slavery.Morrison’s bit is a symbol of power and dehumanization; the characters who wear thebit become wild as well as silenced by its insertion and their inability to remove it.Tompkins’ reference to the bit thus also suggests a feeling of restriction in her earlierteaching attempts, a restriction that she tries to throw off in the course in whichstudents read Beloved. For Tompkins, this course, and others like it, “has not really beenabout explaining literature, it’s really been more about getting people to come out ofthemselves and find out what they want, who they are, and what their relation to a textis. Literature becomes a kind of occasion or excuse for all this” (Begley). By echoingAlbert E. Stone’s idea of the autobiographical occasion, Tompkins explicitly positionsherself as a perpetuator of her students’ autobiographical acts, but far more directly,the course became an occasion for what she sees as her own original act, an explorationof her origins as a new kind of teacher.
Like her earlier reference to amnesia, Tompkins admits that “when I reach back inmy mind for what happened next, there’s nothing” (A Life in School 162). But of course,there’s something, because she goes on to write about this particular course for theremainder of the chapter. Why is it that foundational moments in Tompkins’ teachinglife – her first class, her best class – are so hard for her to recall and record? Thishesitance to claim factual accuracy is not unusual among memoirists, nor is the methodof equivocating over a fact in print (Mary McCarthy famously does both in Memories of aCatholic Girlhood) but what is unusual about Tompkins’ relationship to memory is thatits instability seems to center around the classroom, particularly the classroom in whichshe is teaching. According to her, “it’s hard to tell a straight story, hard to get at thereality of what happened in a class, either on a given day or over time” (A Life in School162). She writes that what makes it difficult is her subjectivity, her desire for success,sometimes her tendency to be overly critical or negative. But in the context of thischapter, one in which she finds out that what she saw as her best class many of thestudents felt was mediocre at best, it seems that what makes it difficult to tell a straightstory is the collective nature of teaching and the difficulty of representing it in one wayor by one person. Furthermore, for Tompkins in particular, her hesitance to articulatewith certainty her memories about teaching connects with her pedagogical ideas aboutthe diffusion of power and creation of collectivity.
The course, which was run and graded by consensus and organized primarily by thestudents, included a trip to a plantation in North Carolina, which resulted in aparticularly intense discussion, the specific contents of which Tompkins does notdivulge. In her description of that trip, she flashes forward, and writes “Talking it overlater, the first student, the one who’d had to leave, said: ‘There were sixteen rooms inthat room’ – meaning there were sixteen different experience of that discussion”(A Life in School 175). Echoing Ayers’ assertion of the multiplicity of stories in anyclassroom (or in this case, motel room), Tompkins gives her student the opportunity tospeak through her text: a student provides the insight that might explain Tompkins’anxiety around writing about teaching. Tompkins goes on to admit that “at the time,though, the only one I wanted to acknowledge was mine” (A Life in School 175). Theprivilege of the memoirist is that she only has to tell her own story, but Tompkinsrealizes that as a teacher trying to depict the classroom, that is impossible. As thechapter continues to its foregone conclusion, the students read aloud evaluations of the
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course that surprise and rattle Tompkins, complaining about the “lack of structure,”“unfocused discussions,” time management, and other components of the course thatTompkins felt had been a “wondrous series of events”; Tompkins is “devastated” (A Lifein School 176). One could certainly say that “there were sixteen courses in that course.”
The story has a coda though, as many of Tompkins’ students come to talk to herprivately, reassessing their course evaluations or expressing how meaningful theexperience had been to them. Most notably, Tompkins includes, ostensibly verbatim, athank you letter from Mark, a student in the course, which she received a month later.In this embedded text, Mark becomes a type of co-author, as the autobiographicalI shifts from talking about Tompkins to representing him, even if just for a moment.This strategy, employed at much greater length almost a decade later by Sondra Perl inOn Austrian Soil: Teaching Those I Was Taught to Hate (2005), brings the student into thetext in a different way than the conventional descriptions of students in the thirdperson. Here, Tompkins balances the instability of her own memory and views of theclass with others who were just as instrumental in its construction. As she notes at thevery end of the text, “I’m still learning what it is to teach and the students feed me”(A Life in School 227). While her students help her to learn how to teach, they alsocontribute to the way she writes about teaching.
In French Lessons, Alice Kaplan writes “there is nothing cruder, nothing simpler, interms of pedagogic power than what goes on in a language classroom” (128). Likewise,critic Kimberly Freeman opens with the assertion “Put most simply, Alice Kaplan’sFrench Lessons is the story of becoming a teacher” (my emphasis, 186). Kaplan and hercritic might have us believe that this is “just” a teacher memoir, but the representationof her teaching is certainly not simplistic. While Tompkins’ text provides a vaguemodel for teachers who may want to replicate her style, Kaplan’s text becomes a typeof handbook for teaching French. Throughout the text, Kaplan details particularmethods that have worked for her in French teaching, from the Capretz method of totalimmersion (133) to the line she draws on the blackboard to illustrate the differencebetween the passe compose and the imparfait (142). At the same time, she providesdetailed descriptions of particular concepts, like the difference between the two tensesin Camus’ The Stranger or the way to master the illusive French “R” sound withoutwhich one will never pass for French. In this way, Kaplan provides hints for teachers ofFrench, but also transforms any reader of the text into a student, her student. Kaplan’sdescriptions of her classroom practice along with inserted lessons in which Kaplanseems to teach the reader directly provide a means for the reader to conclude, asTompkins puts it, what she was like in the classroom.
Along with this transformation of the reader to the student, Kaplan includesvarious individual students as a means of considering the relationship between studentsand teachers in general. Her thoughts on this topic are spurred by her complicatedposition as a former student of Paul de Man and the way in which she eventually usesthe exposure of de Man’s collaboration with the Nazis to her own benefit because she isan expert on French fascism who also happened to study with de Man. At the end of thechapter in which she discusses this relationship she asks, “what do students need toknow about their teachers?” (174). The question is inspired by what Kaplan sees as deMan’s failure, his secrecy about his own past that may or may not have influenced histheoretical ideas. In the following chapter entitled “The Trouble with Edna,”she introduces us to Edna, a student whose studiousness and desperation to become
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French resembles Kaplan’s persona at the same age. Here, the question is turned onKaplan herself, as she traces the development of an individualized student-teacherrelationship where she comes to understand her student because of their similarities.Through her description of Edna, Kaplan questions the teaching of “perfect French”that she grew up learning and now perpetuates as a teacher. If her reading of Edna iscorrect, and Edna’s desires are part of a larger institutional class and geographicprejudice, then in her retelling she takes on the role of de Man and Edna becomes heryounger self. Rather than hide behind theory (which is what she thinks de Man does),or in Kaplan’s case, behind “perfect French,” Kaplan writes autobiographically what shethinks her students need to know about their teacher.
The other named student in Kaplan’s text, Catherine L, illustrates the way inwhich students become teachers in a more formal setting. Throughout these academicautobiographies the authors write of themselves as learners – learning fromexperience, learning from loved ones, learning from mistakes, learning from texts, andalso inevitably learning from their students. Yet, since “what the teacher learned” isoften subtle, often not even acknowledged until later reflection, there are fewerdepictions of students actively teaching their teachers, fewer scenes that show studentsas teachers in the way that we often see teachers as students. Towards the very end ofher text, Kaplan describes one such scene: “Last week we read a novel I didn’treally understand it seemed too simple and I didn’t know how I was going to teach it.I assigned an explication de texte to Catherine L . . . ” (211). Kaplan providesbackground for the novel, as well as the full text of the passage Catherine chose inFrench and English. She then proceeds to describe in great detail how Catherineexplained the passage, including her readings of the passe compose and imparfait thatKaplan taught the reader in earlier sections, and provides Catherine’s conclusion, wordfor word and set off in quotation marks. Like Mark’s thank you note in Tompkins’ text,Catherine’s explication inserts the student voice into the autobiography, providingevidence of another person’s experience of the classroom. But here Kaplan is providinga student’s view – how she is affected by Catherine’s lesson. This is the last scene ofteaching in the text, and in it Kaplan continues her strategy of teaching the reader, butit is a collaborative teaching as her retelling of her student’s words become the lastlesson in the book for the student-reader to take away.
Students in Kaplan’s text pepper her classroom scenes with lively anecdotes butthe named students also provide an opportunity for Kaplan to interrogate the teacher-student relationship, her own teaching style, and ask larger questions about the role ofthe memoir in her own practice. The conclusion of Catherine L’s explication is thatchildren grow up to be writers and to tell their own stories, the very act that Kaplanwas committing during the same time she was teaching Catherine L.6 Kaplan’sautobiographical acts are overtly pedagogical in that she teaches as she tells, but she alsoengaged in autobiography as a means to get at what is behind her teaching.
While memoirs written by academics clearly engage with issues of teaching, theyhave been far less influential in the popular imagination than those texts that take placein elementary, middle or high schools, especially those which have become popularfilms. In the “President’s Column” of the Spring 2008 MLA newsletter, Gerald Graffwrites: “The problem is not that we don’t value good teaching, as our critics still oftencharge, but that we often share our culture’s romanticized picture of teaching as avirtuoso performance by soloists, as seen in films like Dead Poets Society, Dangerous
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Minds, and Freedom Writers” (3). Graff is right to note the cultural influence of theseportrayals, but what he does not address are the other models of teaching and learningavailable in the academic autobiography. What differentiates these academicautobiographies from most of the contemporary teacher memoirs that have floodedbookstores in the past fifteen years is that they refuse the romanticized picture thatGraff alludes to: these teachers do not depict themselves as soloists, nor do they seetheir teaching as a virtuoso performance. For Tompkins and Kaplan teaching is aboutresisting the solo performance and collaborating with students, even if they are notalways successful. As Kaplan puts it: “Teaching, if it succeeds, is dealing with the factthat some of those hams [i.e. the students] will be better than you” (136). In a chaptercalled “Postcards from the Edge” Tompkins includes letters about teaching to a varietyof people, clamoring for help and collaboration; she also includes memories of talkingabout teaching with various colleagues.7
Furthermore, each of these writers make what Miller calls “errors of pedagogy”along the way, and their frank discussions of them help to show that their pedagogicalperformances are not those of an expert, at least not all the time (95). Tompkinsadmits that each class she taught experimentally “had its own history of surprises anddisappointments, moments of revelation, frustration, and joy” (A Life in School 132 –133). She includes her own personal doubts and the criticisms of her critics throughoutthe text as a sort of internal monologue, as does Kaplan who constantly wonders whatright she has to teach French (and to write about it). The subsequent success ofTompkins’ memoir and her various speaking engagements tend to cloud the doubts,failures and criticisms that are evident in the text, particularly in “Postcards from theEdge.” 8 A Life in School is certainly a polemic for Tompkins’ pedagogy; even thatchapter ends with a pat conclusion that she should “carry [her] students in [her] heart”and everything will work out (152). However, the text also provides ample evidencefor those who critique her methods. In this chapter alone Tompkins worries that shecan’t engender discussion (A Life in School 141, 143), doesn’t teach literature (A Life inSchool 143), lets her students slack off (A Life in School 145), is slacking off herself (A Lifein School 147), is cheating her students (A Life in School 146), and is just “pretending toteach” (A Life in School 147). While she defends herself from these allegationsthroughout the text, she also provides anecdotes that could be used to support them.Tompkins and Kaplan also express the huge disconnect between the life of the graduatestudent and that of newly minted professor; neither of them felt adequately prepared toteach anything, as they were never provided with teacher training. Tompkins writes,“If only I’d known, if only someone I respected had talked to me honestly aboutteaching, I might have been saved a lot of pain” (A Life in School 90). Both of thesewriters illustrate the anxiety of teaching, of trying to get it right.
Perhaps these writers are mostly able to escape from the cliches of the movies thatGerald Graff mentions because of the very aspect of academia that makes it difficult forthese texts to be recognized as teacher memoirs in the first place: the way in whichteaching in the academy is often viewed as secondary to other scholarly work. Unlikethe protagonists of these films (and the memoirs upon which Freedom Writers andDangerous Minds were based) whose entire identities hinge on their experience in theclassroom and whose critiques of education are intimately related to their pedagogicalsuccesses and failures, Jane Tompkins and Alice Kaplan are not solely or even primarilyaligned professionally with the role of teacher. Both of them are well-known as critics
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and scholars, and many readers probably come to the text with this identity in mind.Even as Tompkins self-identifies as “the teacher” in her subtitle, before publishing thememoir she was already a recognized feminist scholar and one half of an academiccelebrity pairing with her husband Stanley Fish. In his analysis of the academic starsystem, Donald Shumway points out that the “perks” offered to academic stars ofteninclude a lighter teaching load and more frequent leaves from teaching, which has leadsome critics to argue that the system is detrimental to undergraduate education, butalso exemplifies the way in which teaching is perceived in the academy.9 Thus, themeasure of these women’s success is not as closely linked to teaching as to otheracademic pursuits, especially publication, which allows them more freedom in tellingtheir teaching stories and in admitting their teaching errors.10 In short, Tompkins andKaplan are more likely to be perceived as writers (or scholars) who also teach, whileErin Gruwell and LouAnne Johnson, the authors of Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds,are seen as teachers who also write. Ironically, the devaluation of teaching in theacademy allows for a more nuanced portrayal of the trials and tribulations of teaching inthese texts than in contemporary teacher memoirs that explicitly forefront depictionsof teaching.11
These academic autobiographies tell so many stories that sometimes the teachinggets overlooked. In different ways, each of these texts illustrates the relational nature ofteaching, the way in which interactions with students shape a teacher’s practice anddemonstrate that the writing of a teaching autobiography, like teaching itself, is amany-layered, collaborative process. If we reverse the central question of Kaplan’sautobiography: “what do students need to know about their teachers?” to ask “what doteachers need to know about their students?” we can begin to think about the ways inwhich students are not simply the subjects of, but also collaborators in the constructionof, academic autobiographies. As individuals, Kaplan and Tompkins disclose very littleabout their students, and yet the students are integral components of their attempts tomake meaning of the act of teaching by writing the teacher’s life. To risk stating theobvious, the ways in which students enter into these texts illustrates that the writing ofa teaching autobiography, like teaching itself, would be impossible without them.Kaplan’s and Tompkins’ experimentations with representing students in theirautobiographies emphasize the relational nature of both pedagogical andautobiographical acts.12
Notes
1. The first American teacher memoir dates from 1839 (Alcott). A number of texts werepublished in the 1950s by white teachers who taught in Native American schools, andthere was a proliferation of them in the late 1960s as a response to de facto segregation.
2. Begley posits that these reasons also include individualism run rampant, the exhaustionof the dominant critical idiom and, an expression of midlife crises (54). Greenesuggests that these types of texts register nostalgia for post-World War II non-professional literary journals and the genre of the personal essay (1164). Gray notesthat personal accounts in criticism can be seen as academic facets of the cultural ofdisclosure (51). See also Cynthia Franklin’s Academic Lives for a book-length discussionof academic memoir writing in the 1990s.
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3. For an example of this type of theorizing, see Fox-Genovese, who argues that“autobiographies of black women (even though each is unique) provide a runningcommentary on the collective experience of black women in this country” (65). In thecontext of teacher memoirs, this idea allows Jonathan Kozol to assert that histestimony of the horrors of one segregated school in Boston can be generalized tocondemn other educational situations across the country.
4. Even her descriptions of her mother center on her mother’s memories of schools;Tompkins describes a type of post-memory where she feels the effects of her mother’straumatic schooling experiences (Hirsch).
5. Tompkins also registers this anxiety about going to the bathroom in what has become acentral text of personal criticism, “Me and My Shadow.”
6. Freeman argues persuasively that Catherine L.’s explication actually clarifies Kaplan’sown text (201).
7. Talburt and Salvio disagree; they see Tompkins as embracing a virtuoso teacher imageespecially because she refuses to actually do the work of finding pedagogical modelsthat have already been discussed in existing literature and instead wants to write herown book about it (30). Interestingly, their critique focuses on the act of composingthe book rather than on her teaching itself, and I agree that in writing this textTompkins tries to reinvent the wheel by not engaging with what John Brereton termsin his review of the book, “the ongoing debates that have long shaped educationalthinking” (76). Franklin also critiques the individualism inherent in Tompkins’autobiographical and pedagogical projects (174 – 194). Certainly, some responses toTompkins’ text embrace an image of Tompkins as super-teacher. One obvious onethat Franklin points out is one university’s decision to hire Tompkins as a member oftheir education department, “despite her lack of any formal training in the field ofeducation” (175). However, in the actual text of A Life in School I think Tompkinsregisters enough understanding of the inconclusiveness of her experiment and herreliance on others (her students) to avoid the cliche of the super-teacher perpetuatedby Graff’s examples.
8. See Franklin 174 – 177 and 187 for a discussion of that success.9. See Schneider and Franklin (7 – 13 and chapter four). Shumway also argues that
“autobiography is a means by which some of these critics attempt to establish their ownauthority under the conditions of the star system. The current discourse of literarystudies has made the construction of personality a means of acquiring cultural andacademic capital” (13 – 14).
10. Likewise, one could make a similar argument regarding Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man,a text treated by Thomas Austenfeld in an article in this issue. Because Teacher Man isthe third in a string of wildly successful autobiographies by McCourt who had, by thetime of its publication, cultivated a devoted fan base and had solidified his status asmemoirist, he could afford to admit his pedagogical mistakes in the chorus of meaculpas that Austenfeld describes.
11. For further discussion of this issue, see responses to Jane Tompkins’ essay “Pedagogyof the Distressed” in College English, especially those by Michael Carroll and TerryCaesar. These reactions, as well as Tompkins’ response to them, allude to thedevaluation of teaching as well as Tompkins’ position of privilege as a tenuredprofessor at Duke. Tompkins’ ideas in the essay prefigure her suggestions for teachingpractice in A Life in School.
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12. An early version of this essay was presented at the “Academic Autobiography,Intellectual History, and Cultural Memory in the 20th Century” interdisciplinaryconference in March 2009. My thanks to the attendees for their thought-provokingresponses and questions, and to Rocio G. Davis for organizing the conference and forher helpful editorial comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Erin LeeMock, Tahneer Oksman and especially Nancy K. Miller for their valuable feedback.
References
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———. A Life In School: What the Teacher Learned. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996.———. “Pedagogy of the Distressed.” College English 52.6 (October 1990): 653–60.
JessicaWells Cantiello is a Ph.D. candidate at the Graduate Center of the City University
of New York. Her dissertation examines the history and significance of the teacher
memoir in the United States from 1839 to the present. Her work has been published in
Antıpodas: Journal of Hispanic and Galician Studies, and an article is forthcoming in
African American Review. Address: 900 West 190th St., Apt. 7D, New York, NY 10040.
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