A teaching philosophy of sorts

A series of unrelated events over the last few days has reminded me of the Teaching Excellence Award I received four years ago. An office dredge (still in progress) unearthed the plaque from beneath a small mountain of detritus. A good friend from grad school “liked” one of the official photographs of the festivities (not the one shown here, by the way) on my Facebook page. A request from my boss for information about my research agenda sent me to my curriculum vita. And, most recently, a no doubt futile attempt to quell the proliferation of icons on my computer screen led me to the text of my remarks on that occasion—we (the recipients from each of the colleges at the university) were given two to three minutes to discuss our “teaching philosophy.”

I operate under no illusions that such awards actually mean anything. Oh, I found room on my CV to mention receiving it, and I certainly cashed the check. But to suggest that I’m “better” than literally dozens of my colleagues in the College of Fine Arts (or that I wasn’t as good as whoever won the award the five previous years) on this basis is downright silly.

Still, I kind of like what I had to say that day, and I thought I’d share it:

In the past few days I’ve talked about Charles Darwin and Josef Stalin and Don Imus in my theatre classes. Today, I’d like to reverse that paradigm and talk about theatre as a means of discussing something else.

We start with Konstantin Stanislavski, who revolutionized the way actors approach their work by suggesting that an actor, as character, should pursue an objective. But he also said that an objective is playable only if there is an obstacle, something to overcome or circumvent. But teaching without learning is irrelevant; learning without teaching is sufficient. And since there is no obstacle to teaching, my objective (and therefore my philosophy) can’t be about teaching, but about facilitating learning... and I do think this is more than a mere semantic distinction. No one else in the room might agree with me, but I suspect the actors will.

All of which means that for “teaching” to occur, we need learners who are open-minded and curious and unashamed of intellect. Sometimes they come pre-packaged that way. But, for all the fact that we in the School of Theatre get at least our share of starry-eyed post-adolescents, I would suggest that relatively few come to us in the fond hope that someday, somehow, they, too, might become... theatre historians. And what that means is that it becomes my job to inspire, to stimulate, to catalyze engagement. Exactly how we go about accomplishing that is a matter of personal style rather than a “philosophy.” But there is one constant: passion. A former colleague used to say that “teaching is easy. Just find something that you find so interesting that you can’t not tell somebody else.” And, by extension, keep telling them until they “get it.”

Linked to this is the lesson of Max Reinhardt, who was one of the first directors to employ different production approaches for different kinds of plays, an idea that seems self-evident today but was actually rather radical in its time. The lesson for us is not only that different courses require different approaches, but also that different students respond to different strategies, and we have to do what we can to reach them all.

Finally, one more parallel between teaching/learning and acting. A theatre historian isn’t “good” because he knows what year the Dionysian Festival was founded any more than an actor is “good” because he remembers his lines. Those aren’t endpoints, they’re places to start. And that, really, is centerpiece of anything I could reasonably call my “teaching philosophy.” Our job as students and teachers alike isn’t to memorize lists and names and dates and formulae, it’s to problem-solve, to search for the truth, whether that that truth is to be discovered (like a law of physics) or created (like a work of art). We must always be unsatisfied with Conventional Wisdom, and we must remember, in the words of the great playwright Oscar Wilde,“the truth is rarely pure and never simple.”

That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.

I seem to have been pretty smart four years ago. There is no accounting for what happened in the interim.