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.