Anne-Marie Harvey
Graduate Student, UC Berekely
I am a graduate student in the English Department at U.C. Berkeley, where I am nearing the end of my dissertation, and where I have taught or helped to teach mostly freshman reading and composition courses for about six years (courses of my own design and direction for the past four years). Partly because my studies have focused on twentieth-century American literature, I've taught literature largely from that time and place, though I have also taught texts ranging from Shakespeare plays to contemporary African short stories. My dissertation is a cultural studies project about versions of manhood in Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, and Edith Wharton short stories in the context of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies' Home Journal, where those stories were first published. I have recently shaped a portion of my chapter on Jack London into an article called "Sons of the Sun: Making White, Middle-Class Manhood in Jack London's David Grief stories and the Saturday Evening Post." I've also done work that focused solely on popular culture, including an article about advertising in Life magazine in the forties and another about masculinity in Terminator 2.
Students at U.C. Berkeley are intelligent, assertive, and diverse in culture, ethnicity, and language. In my freshman seminars, Anglo, native-born students with English as a first language are always a numerical minority. At Berkeley, the importance of reading literature from a variety of cultural backgrounds, as well as literature addressing the immigrant experience and issues of language and translation, is very clear. I invariably learn a lot from my students about what we read and about their lives. In my own courses, as is the custom for reading and composition seminars at Berkeley, I have tended to start with a broad theme (for example, ideal societies, fatherhood, the working-class experience, or commodity culture) and gather an array of texts around that theme. In a course centered on the theme of fatherhood, we read, in part, essays by James Baldwin and Richard Rodriguez, King Lear, Fae Myenne Ng's novel Bone about a Chinese-American immigrant family in San Francisco, and Faulker's The Bear; we also watched Boaz Yakin's 1994 movie "Fresh", about a kid in the projects who puts his father's instruction in chess to use in triumphing over local drug dealers.
I show at least one movie per course; in fact, the aspect of my teaching I'm proudest of is probably my use of popular culture. I have treated movies, television shows and advertisements in my classes as serious, complicated, and culturally significant works, often with enthusiastic and perceptive responses by my students. I hope that I'm sending my students into the world with a heightened critical sense about the popular culture that bombards them. Several years ago, I showed my class an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called "The Outsider," and they uncovered, to their delight, both a pluralistic, pro-gay rights subtext and also the heterosexist messages lurking beneath that. The viewing also sparked a heated discussion about gay rights, which in turn prompted one student to write an eloquent essay -- much better than his previous writing in the course --- about his experience as a Korean-American gay man.
The composition part of teaching reading and comp. has been the greatest challenge for me. When I began teaching at Berkeley, there wasn't much support for graduate students starting out as teachers of writing; I learned from the people I taught with and from various books about teaching. I have also learned from my students, who enter by classes with a bewildering range of writing ability -- some needing to tone down their stilted, academic style, some needing to learn what an essay, a paragraph, or even a sentence is, some new to writing in English with American conventions, and some with a paralyzing lack of confidence in their own voices. In working with my students to find ways that really work to get started, write, and revise, I have surprised myself by changing significantly my own ways of writing. Where I used to painfully create outlines and write A to Z, I now freewrite and make clusters and draft and revise. Teaching composition has made my own dissertation-writing go more easily.
This summer, I look forward most basically to having time, space and a community dedicated specifically to considering teaching. I look forward to thinking about how to bridge the gap between my scholarly work and my teaching; I've often felt like I lacked the time for working out theses connections. I look forward to learning from experienced teachers and to bringing all of this back to my students the next time I teach at Berkeley -- and soon, with some luck, to my students at a new college teaching job.
Email: amh@uclink2.berkeley.edu
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