Thoughts on teaching

Most university teachers today are responsible to guide students in more than one style of learning. Our teaching might shift between contrasting subfields or areas of inquiry; we might teach courses that mix theory with practice, or change our methods to accommodate different specialized topics. When our teaching is interdisciplinary, we sometimes have to nurture one learning style at the expense of another that might be equally relevant—for example, a course on postwar composer/band-leaders can’t easily include assignments in both advanced tonal analysis and essays on musicians’ intellectual and cultural legacies. Perhaps most difficult: the students in any given classroom often present a wide range of academic experience, readiness-to-engage, and prior acquaintance with almost any kind of course material.

I’m not sure how new this variety is, but more than ever, teachers are asked to traverse its gamut. In about half of my teaching assignments, my students mix abstract theories with practical skills, analyzing written music ranging from Bach to Braxton, while learning how to hear and reproduce those musical worlds fluently. But my other teaching ranges widely: in one seminar, I introduce methods from the cognitive sciences to PhD musicology students; later that day I might lecture on popular culture to an American Studies class of 400+, struggling to relate bullet points and YouTube videos to participatory online exercises. Across these territories, can there be some unifying philosophy of teaching?

This thin spread of efforts has surely slowed my development as a teacher. After seven years at UC Santa Cruz, I still feel like a beginner, having put on some of these hats only a couple of times. However, my range of objectives is also an asset—and not just because “what doesn’t kill me…” Moving repeatedly between large anonymous lecture halls and graduate mentoring has helped me re-think core beliefs about teaching and learning. I’ve noticed a shift of emphasis: from managing student experiences meticulously, to approach that mixes planning with a less detailed approach involving collaboration and the benefits of the unexpected. (Or that’s my hope at least. I think I just heard my current students muttering “Yes please. And when is this shift scheduled to occur?”)

Many of us want to let students choose their own varied paths through materials and assignments, but it’s hard to know how to implement that kind of freedom without frustrating students with a feeling of disorganization. Combining my tendency toward detail, with my desire for flexibility, my approach has sometimes involved divergent essay topics in each of several 2-week units of a course; each topic emphasizing different aspects of the course materials. But managing numerous assignment pathways can drown an instructor in minutiae. There always seems to be just one more nuance to tweak, or one more step to clarify, and beyond a certain point this sort of work isn’t a good use of time.  More important: students don’t always find that kind of freedom, or organization, rewarding.

My initial efforts to focus on organization and detail rested on a few assumptions about pedagogy that I feel I have gradually let go. 

1. I used to believe that my best work as a teacher resulted from direct efforts at clear communication and planning; I now value more highly the indirect results of how I motivate my students.
2. I used to think that “motivational” college teachers were pandering and entertaining unnecessarily. But motivation is integral to good teaching in complex ways. I now consider one of my most important tasks to be the design of environments and circumstances that bring out the right kind of learning enthusiasm at the right time.
3. My drive to manage and sculpt course experiences was based on my assumption that in learning, students are comforted by certainty, and that ambiguities are liabilities. I might have known better!: as an improvising composer, I thrive on unplanned situations, and cultivate them for outcomes I can’t gain any other way. I now not only allow for improvisation in my teaching, but plan for it.
4. I have found that when I “nurture” spontaneity and the unknown in the right way, students can activate and mobilize toward knowledge of their own making in the spaces left open. 

Through observations like these, I have begun to concentrate on putting in place the kinds of provocations, structures, and environments that—rather than aim at thorough, well-‘managed’ expressions of the course content—will compel students to express the materials or ideas to themselves, and to each other. Examples:

• Instead of simply showing students a diagram of a Chopin Prelude (to emulate later in their own analyses of similar works), I sometimes present a series of diagram fragments, each of which presents an incomplete image of musical structure. I then ask students what information the fragments lack. I find they are motivated as a group to satisfy that lack, taking initiative in conversations with each other, and in their projects.
• Early in a syllabus, I might present a difficult example that provokes questions not normally relevant until later in the quarter. Usually it’s a piece of music that might even require background to address than my course could provide on its own. I let them know in advance that we’re in over our heads, and we flounder around for a while, trying a dialogue that isn’t orderly or well-defined. After 10 minutes or so, coming up empty-handed, I ask the students to consider improving on the conversation in the weeks and months ahead.

In some exercises like these, I confess to my students that I’m not certain that we will reach our objective. The fragments of that Chopin analysis might not add up, or provide the key they’re looking for; the reasoning behind an emotionally resonant costume choice or a lyric in a music video might never be academically explicable. But I find the students aren’t frightened by that uncertainty. They’re challenged by it, and spend the term hoping that their efforts as learners will be such that, not only for them but for their teacher, something interesting and new emerges.

Related materials

My curriculum vitae.

Sample course syllabus [Dialogues and Questions: Writing at the Intersection of Theory and Practice [Or visit my “Current Courses” page.]

Sample course activity. For listening assignments in this activity, you will need to contact me for a username and password.