Teaching – Roth on Wesleyan

This essay on teaching intellectual history courses that take religion seriously builds on some pages in Safe Enough Spaces. It recently appeared in The Atlantic

I had hardly finished my lecture when the student came bounding down the auditorium’s stairs.

“You’re just like all the others,” he said, fuming. “You don’t really take religion seriously.”

This happened a few years ago, when I was teaching a college course on virtue and vice. I had just finished talking about the Catholic thinker Thomas Aquinas. My sin? According to my student, I had “intellectualized” Saint Thomas. I had described his philosophical sources and his historical context, but had said little about the philosopher’s fundamental project—one that had everything to do with the salvation of our souls.

My student’s name, fittingly, was Tom. He was a believer at a secular liberal-arts school, and he was sick of being condescended to either by a campus lousy with self-congratulatory progressives or by teachers (like me, he assumed) who treated religious faith as an inert museum piece. “Wait,” I told him. “Today we talked historical context, and next time we’ll illuminate religious practice.”Tom was a rare exception. As a teacher, I find remarkable resistance to bringing religious ideas and experiences into class discussions. When I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about salvation, or the immortality of the soul, my normally talkative undergraduates suddenly stare down at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with answers: predestination; “faith, not works”; and so on. But if I go on to ask students how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their laptops. They look anywhere but at me—for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In my cultural-history classes, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when I bring up the topic of religious feeling or practice, an awkward silence always ensues.

As a nonbeliever myself, I am not trying to convert any student to any religion. Yet how to discuss religious faith in class poses a major challenge for nonreligious colleges and universities. How can such an institution claim to educate students about ideas, culture, and ways of life if students, professors, or both are uncomfortable when talking about something that’s been central to humanity throughout recorded history?

I teach my classes at Wesleyan University, where I am also the president. For most of its first century, the school was—as its name indicates—firmly in the tradition of the theologian John Wesley, the founder of Methodism. In 1831, Wesleyan’s first president, Wilbur Fisk, articulated the mission of the school as being for “the good of the individual and the good of the world,” drawing on Methodism’s synthesis of deeply personal spirituality and the pursuit of social reform. Indeed, the passion for reform often was energized by that spirituality. In the early 1900s, Wesleyan officially became a secular university, eventually prizing academic freedom and independent research rather than adhering to a set of religious teachings.

Still, Fisk’s words have continued to ring true. Although few of our students today know much about John Wesley’s charismatic preaching or the core tenets of Methodism, many of them are still perfectly comfortable with the idea of finding one’s own good while also doing work in the world that promotes what they now call social justice. If they no longer have a principled spirituality, they need to think hard about what else sustains efforts aimed at justice—and about how politics, ethics, and the nature of knowledge have been intertwined with religious faith and practice.

Yet classroom discussions of these very subjects often seem threatening to even students of faith, who tell me they don’t want to be “outed” on campus. These undergrads encounter mostly secular professors who sometimes treat religious believers as somehow intellectually deficient, or as morally compromised by their commitments to traditions that their teachers have left behind.

These students have ample reason to feel left out. Not long ago, a group of such students at Wesleyan asked me to participate in a discussion about religion on campus, and now it was my turn to try to hide. “Hey,” I said, “I’m an atheist Jew. I’m the wrong guy to talk about these topics.” They pressed: What happened to your commitment to intellectual diversity? I signed up for the event. The organizers had planned a public conversation with Michael Wear, the director of evangelical outreach for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign, and more than 100 students attended, comfortable to be talking about these issues in “safe enough” company. I participated, but while doing so I also explained my reluctance to show up. As a Jew, I worried about the easy slide from “evangelical outreach” to harassment, and then to anti-Semitism. The tension in the room was real, and so were the issues we discussed.

I wasn’t converted to Wear’s liberal evangelicalism that night, and he wasn’t persuaded by my combination of atheism and Torah study. What I took away most of all was the reluctance of students to “bring their whole selves to class”—as we urge all Wesleyan students to do—because of perceived prejudice against faith practices. Now, some may say that students should check their faith at the door (perhaps alongside their privilege) before they enter the seminar room. But that’s not the way I teach. In my classes, I want students to bring their complex, changing identities into our efforts to wrestle with enduring questions of love and judgment, justice and violence, grace and forgiveness. These are historical questions, but they can also be meaningful in students’ lives right now. If we neglect these issues in our liberal-arts classes, we are cutting off a vital domain of human experience from an education claiming to deepen cultural understanding. And we desperately need that understanding in our polarized society.In my next class with Tom, we talked about Aquinas’s connection to Saint Augustine’s “short command,” by which he told the faithful to “love, and do what you will.” We talked about the struggle to bring love and intellect together, about the mystics and their relation to the philosophers. Tom energetically joined our discussion of how religious traditions create practices that link faith and reason and reveal the tensions between them. I didn’t need to be a believer to create space in the classroom for him and others to be fully present to learn. I did have to respect what people of faith brought to the conversation.What my students ultimately believe is none of my business. But they, like all other college students, need to understand what it’s like to be absorbed in robust traditions, including religious ones. They—and I—should refuse to hide behind narrow versions of critical thinking that keep them from engaging with people whose lives are energized by compassion and forgiveness. Becoming more aware of the multiplicity of traditions and practices will make all of us more curious about and more empathetic toward others’ beliefs—and more humble with respect to our own.

Many of us have turned our thoughts and hopes toward the Wesleyan student injured this weekend at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity. The university will be updating the campus community about her condition as we receive more information from her family.

The semester is now well underway, even if some students are still finalizing their schedules. I’ve been talking with colleagues about their classes, and I’m always so impressed by their excitement and engagement with the course material and with their students. At Wesleyan we are fortunate to have so many fine teachers, and over the last several years we have added resources that encourage professors to share instructional techniques, including the use of new technologies. Great teachers are always learning.

Across the country, politicians, pundits and educators have been debating how we can improve instruction in the K-12 system. I recently reviewed a fine book on the subject, Elizabeth Green’s How to Build a Better Teacher. This is cross-posted with the Washington Post:

America has some of the best schools on the planet and one of the worst systems of education in the developed world. We have produced educational philosophies that have inspired teachers and students on every continent, but we have failed badly in implementing strategies that would either cultivate talents or address deficiencies.

This is not for lack of trying. Over a long period of time, federal and state governments have spent billions of dollars creating fancy programs dedicated to reorganizing where and how kids learn. In recent years we have built a testing industry based on the theory that if you can evaluate something, you can improve it. After all that effort, we have the tests, but where are the viable strategies for improving teaching and learning?

In “Building a Better Teacher,” Elizabeth Green examines the forces for and obstacles against change in our schools. But she doesn’t engage directly in the political debates that swirl around tenure, unions, cheating, over-testing and growing inequality. Instead, she identifies and dispels three deep sources of confusion: one myth and two inadequate arguments.

Green finds the “Myth of the Natural-Born Teacher” to be pervasive and pernicious. It attributes great teaching to personality traits that can’t be learned: “You either have it or you don’t.” This keeps us from developing a professional culture to improve teaching. Instead, we seek to hire people who have “it,” without defining what “it” is.

Two arguments that feed off this myth are labeled by Green accountability and autonomy. According to the first, we must measure a teacher’s results by testing his or her students (again and again). Data from the tests will be used to hold the teacher accountable (read: punishments and rewards) without a clue about how to improve performance. According to the autonomy argument, nobody can understand what goes on in a classroom better than teachers themselves. Instruction is so personal that we must respect the professional autonomy of teachers and let them do what feels right to them (whatever that is).

The myth and the arguments keep us from accomplishing what the philosopher John Dewey called for decades ago: develop “an analysis of what the gifted teacher does intuitively,” so we can create a culture in which effective teaching and deep learning take place.

Green describes with verve some of the key efforts to show that great teaching is a professional achievement rather than a natural ability. In the 1980s Lee Shulman recognized that teachers, like physicians, must learn how to combine their specific subject expertise with an ability to make that knowledge relevant to others. More recently, Magdalene Lampert has shown how sharing best classroom practices can promote teaching as a “complex craft” mastered over time. Green paints a picture of dedicated professionals striving to create a culture that can refine, share, improve upon and disseminate effective pedagogy. She points out that teachers need to know how to turn “a student’s slippery intuition into solid understanding” — and that this kind of knowledge can itself be taught.

Creating the infrastructure to develop this knowledge is a massive undertaking, given the scale of our heterogeneous systems. There are more than 3.7 million teachers in this country, and looming retirements mean that we can expect to hire around 3 million new teachers by 2020.

But the most interesting parts of “Building a Better Teacher” don’t have to do with numbers, systems or politics. Green is at her best when she describes how dedicated teachers work in the classroom. It isn’t nearly enough, she explains, for instructors to show their pupils how to get the right answers. Teachers have to divine why youngsters landed on the wrong answers and then steer them away from error so that in the future they can find their own way.

And that’s the key to great teaching at any level: cultivating in students the enhanced capacity to think for themselves in productive ways when they are no longer in the classroom or doing homework. This is so much more than following a rule or showing discipline (though both are often necessary). Green’s pages on teachers who help their students to think mathematically are particularly effective. But how to share teaching strategies that work?

Green compares the Japanese use of discussion sessions, jugyokenkyu, with the American reluctance to talk about teaching techniques at all. In Japan, regular observation and discussions turn the discovery of effective strategies in individual classrooms into a comprehension of craft that can be shared by a community of professionals.

A community of professionals is not the same thing as a union defending basic working conditions; nor is it a high-flying cadre of charismatic instructors whose students score well on exams. It’s the human core of effective instruction. All the testing in the world is just an “exoskeleton” and won’t provide this foundation.

Many obstacles inhibit the development of a culture for learning the craft of teaching. But Green emphasizes the ingredients for positive change that are currently in place. In addition to advances in teacher training, there are energetic entrepreneurs creating schools with ambitious, measurable goals: “The Common Core offered coherence, the research on teaching and teacher education offered a starting point for a curriculum, and the entrepreneurs added passion and a laboratory for experimentation.”

Now that we know how great a difference skilled teachers can make, we should leave behind the myth of the natural teacher, and our obsessions with accountability or autonomy. “The only logical conclusion,” Green writes, is “that American education ought to build a coherent infrastructure — clear goals, accurate tests, trained instructors — to teach teaching.”

Despite her lack of attention to the wider culture and context, Green’s account of passionate educators dedicated to their “complex craft” should be part of every new teacher’s education. It is vital for the United States to build better teachers to inspire the lifelong learning that not only our students but also their instructors so desperately need.

Teaching and Religion

Building Better Teachers