Tim Murnen
The Joint Ph.D. Program in English and Education
The University of Michigan
tmurnen@umich.edu
http://www.umich.edu/~tmurnen

As a high school English teacher turned Ph.D. student en route to becoming a university professor, I am discovering that my strength as a teacher lies in the fact that I am still a student, still sitting in the little desks out there in the rows, still engaged in the pursuit of wisdom, still naïve enough to believe there is always more to learn. There is something about walking out of a classroom after teaching my own class, gulping down a cup of ramen noodles, and racing across campus to be a student in someone else's class that keeps me humbled, and focused on the pedagogy-the stuff that happens between student and teacher in and out of the classroom. I know what students feel like every day-the exhilaration and the humiliation. Students are very present to me as I design a course, and as I teach.

Right now I am most focused on how texts intersect our own real lives. For a year or so before my 92 year grandmother died, I spent Sunday mornings with her-bringing communion in a little metal pix, sipping tea, and talking about family history. She came from Ireland in 1920 with a suitcase she shared with her sister. She was a hard-headed old woman and she was reluctant to talk about herself, but I went anyway, every Sunday, and we both got something from the exchange. I am still mining that experience. It inspired me to have my students do a Slice of Life Biography unit-challenging them to sit and talk to someone who means something to them, someone who lived through a different time and place than their own experience. And over the years I have tweaked the assignment, most recently by bringing in Tom Romano's notion of the multigenre essay. It is just one assignment I have found successful, probably because it continues to find new life as I encounter new texts.

For instance, this summer with the Making American Literatures seminar I read Art Spiegelman's MausII, an exploration of his own strained relationship with his father, Vladek, who survived Auschwitz. MausII is one of the texts I am using in class this semester, and from it students are exploring a range issues that arise as the texts we read in class intersect our real lives. One student is writing about racism in Hungary, where she lived for years. Another student was struck by Vladek's racism toward blacks, and is writing about how this tension from the text plays out in the Jewish and African American communities today. A third student is writing about the tension she feels with her Chinese immigrant parents. Another student is creating a book of short essays and poems inspired by MausII, and another student is responding to the visual dimension of the text by creating a sculpture and writing about what she has discovered through the process of interacting with the text via art.

Outside of this composition class, I also work with the MAC program here at the University of Michigan, a team-based Masters level teacher education program. As well, I am studying video ethnography with Professor Lesley Rex, and educational software design with Professor Nichole Pinkard. I have also been working on a Spencer grant project with Professor Pamela Moss, studying the effectiveness of portfolios in the assessment of beginning teachers. In my spare time I have been reinforcing my front and back porches, repairing the tin roof on my barn, and landscaping the yard on a graduate student's budget (including figuring out what to do with moles). But most importantly, alongside my wife I am busy raising two daughters and a Yellow Labrador Retriever named Teddy.