Honoring Teaching: Peter McIsaac
Germanic languages professor says he focuses on teaching culture as well as language
Friday, April 22, 2005
Durham, N.C. -- As an instructor of a foreign language and culture, I strive to
foster students’ mastery of linguistic and cultural codes and
intellectual and literary traditions that may initially be
unfamiliar to them. In some sense, I see myself as a kind of
erudite guide whose task it is, using his knowledge of the target
and native terrains, to conduct students on a journey of encounter
to which they come with varying kinds of “outfitting” (for
instance, level of German, background in literary interpretation,
experience living abroad). I take the notion of encounter
seriously, particularly the idea that the outcome of an encounter
cannot be entirely predicted or controlled. Thus the journeys I
offer my students are exciting and open-ended (also for me as
instructor); they are interactive and as much a function of
students’ needs and responses as they are of my itinerary.
Ultimately, I view myself as a cultural mediator whose mission it
is to bring students to environments that will suitably engage,
challenge, and inspire them, so that, as they gain competence,
knowledge, and experience within the discipline and the foreign
language culture, they will increasingly be able to strike out
independently on their own intellectual (and sometimes literal)
journeys.
I work from the premise that student mastery of linguistic proficiency cannot be separated from gaining competence in the historical, cultural and literary discourses related to that language. This premise, which is guided as much by my years of teaching experience as it is by the current pedagogical research in my field, means that my courses cannot be divided into those that offer “language skills” and those that offer “content.” At all levels, my courses are devised to treat a set of cultural problems that can be explored using a multitude of perspectives, discourses and media, and cultural artifacts in context. I have therefore taught intermediate and advanced German centered on issues such as “technology, politics and culture” and “ethnicity and identity,” respectively. The texts, films, and internet activities used to illuminate these topics have a dual function. On the one hand, they represent insightful positions in past and present German-speaking debates on these pressing issues, exposing students to the contours of foreign language discourses and thought. On the other hand, most students in the US context will be readily able to recognize that they and their society are grappling with many of these same issues in a different cultural context. One of my main objectives in all my courses is to have students enter into a thoughtful relationship with the target culture (German) while reflecting critically on the cultural and discursive assumptions that frame their own thinking. It is in this kind of encounter that teaching foreign language and culture offers something irreplaceable and unique in US post-secondary education.
In all of my teaching, I want to offer my students a range of opportunities to interpret and produce German in meaningful, communicative contexts. As an example of this, I have students in my advanced German course write texts in a variety of genres and engage in activities such as my “news game,” a weekly panel presentation of stories culled from authentic German news sources. Working as a team, the three presenters summarize two stories that were actually reported and one that is plausible but “fake,” leaving the class to tell which is which. From week to week, students developed strategies ever better suited their inventions, sometimes employing the high discourses of serious newspapers and sometimes the sensationalism of the lower end of the news spectrum. Even as they learned about what counted as news in Germany, students began to incorporate clever hidden clues to their classmates in their invented reports, using German idioms as a way of communicating with each other. An integral part of the exercise was to analyze the linguistic and rhetorical strategies in each story, helping students to hone their awareness of German discursive conventions and how they operate in context.
Like my courses at lower levels, my advanced courses employ a range of perspectives and disciplinary approaches to cultural and intellectual questions. Though many of my courses are interdisciplinary, I am careful to use an interdisciplinary framework only when a given topic lends itself to being studied from the vantage of more than one discipline, such as the history of the museum or the intersections of science, technology, and literary culture. I find interdisciplinary teaching to be challenging, as it requires not only that the instructor seriously engage with the theoretical presuppositions and bodies of knowledge of the respective disciplines but also that he or she work to create consistency by helping students forge links between disparate ways of thinking. Attempting to do this in a foreign language adds to the forethought and planning that must go into course preparation. One way I address these challenges is to build coherence into a course through a unified theoretical framework, a treatment of related problems over time, and/or geographical space. Thus in my FOCUS course “Berlin in the 20th Century,” students learn to perform close analyses of film, literature, history, and architecture through the five governmental systems that have prevailed in Berlin in the last century. My course “Freud’s Vienna: Experiments in Modernity,” in contrast, examines the questions and conflicts of emerging modern culture in a single place in the years immediately before and after 1900. In this course, the cohesion offered by a single city and limited timeframe enable me to treat culture in a rich and multi-faceted way, including literature, psychoanalysis, art, architecture, and music. Another way I provide coherence is to relate my teaching to my own research and training, as in my courses on the history of the museum, science and technology, and gender studies. In the same vein, I try whenever possible to schedule guest lecturers with current research interests in fields farther from my own investigations. Whether I am bringing my own or others’ research into the classroom, I want to use it to open pathways for students to begin their own explorations. Research is most exciting in an interactive environment that promotes student contributions to discussion, problem solving, and the building of arguments.
In my desire to improve my courses, I am willing to invest time when possibilities for innovation emerge. In Fall 2004, I seized upon the educational potential offered by the iPod to add a sonic dimension to “Berlin in the 20th Century.” I used the iPod in three ways. First, the iPod provided students with convenient access to historical recordings of Berlin’s music, from 1920s cabaret songs and to the underground music scene of the 1980s and the techno explosion of the late 1990s. Second, the iPod made it possible to analyze a series of speeches and news reports marking the rapidly changing political environment, including JFK’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” address and Reagan’s injunction to Gorbatchov to “tear down this wall.” Hearing the delivery of these speeches along with sounds such as crowd noise greatly enriched our textual evaluation of these speeches, helping students to hone in on the rhetorical and political factors that made these speeches significant in both German and American history. And finally, throughout the semester groups of students recorded interviews with Americans, using an iPod accessory, to find out how seminal events in the city's history—the World Wars, the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall—are perceived in the United States. Using this single device in creative ways, the learning experience was enriched in ways not possible in previous versions of this course, by introducing the delivery of authentic artifacts from the target culture as well as prompting students to reflect on the cultural environment framing their own approach to Germany and German culture.
I have been particularly committed to fostering an intellectually vibrant undergraduate experience at Duke. Because my regular course offerings encompass only one facet of my larger responsibility as a teacher and mentor, this means developing meaningful relationships with students both in and outside the classroom. In an effort to foster creative student inquiry, I have tailored independent studies for several students with interests that could not be met through the standard courses in the department. I have also advised students on Senior Theses and their applications for grants and graduate school (former advisees have studied at Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin). As the campus coordinator for Robert Bosch Foundation and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) scholarship, I have been especially involved in helping students transform their intellectual journeys into literal ones to Germany. Finally, I think it is mutually beneficial for faculty and students to encounter each other in settings that connect learning with their life experiences. Beyond teaching and traveling with students in the FOCUS program, I lived as a Faculty in Residence for three years in the Round Table selective house. In that capacity, my wife and I provided weekly programming that contributed to the intellectual development of our students. In addition to their establishing relationships with us, we have helped bring other faculty members into the dorm in order that students would see a more varied spectrum of intellectual life. Most recently, I agreed to serve as a faculty advisor to the University Scholars Program so that I can remain involved with students who want to push back the limits of their own understanding and know better what questions students are bringing to their studies.
If teaching is at all like a journey of encounter, it represents an on-going process more than a destination. This is as true for me as a teacher as it is for my students. As I grow as a scholar and a teacher, it is all I can do to let new insights, discoveries, and the needs of the students inform the directions my teaching will take. This seems to be the best way to ensure that my students in my courses will continue to gain not only increased factual knowledge, but also the capacity to reflect on and make use of that knowledge in their future encounters.
