Larry J. Zimmerman
Teaching is a word I've come to despise.
Sadly, our society has commodified it. Administrators and promotion/tenure committees assess it using number-crunching evaluations. Regents and legislators demand its quantification into contact hours or demands for minimum students numbers in the classroom. Faculty members and Department Chairs squabble over percentages of teaching as part of workload. I don't like to use the word, but contemporary academic situations force me to. This deserves explanation.
By turning it into a commodity, we've made teaching a one-sided act, a product really, flowing only one way, from professor to student. That's profoundly unfortunate, a symptom, I suppose, of business models of higher education where some envision students as consumers. That's not what we should be about.
What universities should be about is learning, not teaching. When I find myself in front of a student, I strive for an act that is two-way, where there is some level of exchange regarding whatever subject is at hand. When I find myself in front of many students, the act is multifaceted. I serve as much as recipient as donor, and I become a conduit between other actors, modified by each exchange. Whereas we've made teaching a product, learning is a process and one vastly more complex than teaching.
Whenever I find myself with students, I often forget who I am. I find myself fascinated by the exchange of information. I excitedly prattle on about the intricacies of a ceramic design from an archaeological site in South Dakota. I pontificate about the profound acts of genocide committed against contemporary indigenous people in South America. It doesn't matter that I might have said the same thing for forty-seven consecutive semesters in my introductory cultural anthropology course or a single time in my conflict and warfare seminar. What I get is response. Perhaps it's only a bored stare, a puzzled look, or the rhythmic staccato of a pencil impatiently paradiddled on a desk. On the other hand, it may be a challenging retort from a student. The feedback's the thing. If it's the former response, I learn that I'm not getting through, perhaps because I haven't thought something through carefully enough to express it well. If it's the latter, I learn that I may be onto something, perhaps an idea needing pursuit or elaboration. In either case, the learning is exhilarating because I am compelled to respond in some way.
In truth, and to the amazement of many colleagues, I really like large, lower division courses. Introductory courses, even on the xxth time through, are fun. Nowhere, even in an all graduate student seminar, is the learning more intense. I dearly love to warp and twist their minds. Professing anthropology, that's so easy to do. Providing culture shock and exposing their raw ethnocentrism forces them to restructure reality. My own mind is stretched by seeing their struggle to understand the ways of other members of their species. I do also like small groups of advanced students. Learning with them is complex, usually more refined and often delicately layered, but no less exhilarating. Recently, I had my first opportunity to teach an all graduate student class on historical memory. I found myself in awe of their ability to process difficult ideas, constantly challenging applications of theoretical concept to the "real" world of memory. I learned so much with them. I've told several colleagues that it was one of the best learning experiences of my recent career. But learning goes well beyond this classroom environment.
Learning is the forgotten interface between teaching, research, and service. We've done ourselves a disservice by presenting these aspects of academic life as separate entities. They are really just aspects of learning. With research, I learn every day about my interests in the past, about indigenous people, and about anthropology. This learning informs my teaching in no uncertain ways. For example, I've been intrigued for years about how it is that people can hold onto beliefs about the past in spite of data that contradict everything they believe. I've examined everything from educated people who believe in extraterrestrial intervention into human affairs, to American Indians who hold dearly to oral tradition about their origins in spite of solid archaeological evidences to the contrary, to students who repeat thoroughly debunked American narratives about the exploits of George Washington or some other culture hero. This learning has allowed me to produce both publications and learning situations where I can share this information with a range of audiences.
All my learning is informed by the comparative, holistic, and relativistic perspectives of anthropology. Filtered through anthropology, this learning has put me in a position that allowed me to serve, for example, as chair of my national professional organization's Committee on Ethics and their Native American Scholarship Committee. Work with indigenous people internationally led to election and service as Executive Secretary of the World Archaeological Congress. At the same time on the local level, it brought me to service as the faculty advisor to the Tiyospaye Council, the American Indian student organization at the University of South Dakota, as well as an unofficial position advising the American Indian Science and Engineering Society chapter and the American Indian Student Association at the University of Iowa. I wouldn't have suspected it, but these insights also get applied daily in my adminsitrative role where understanding organizational culture is must. In turn, all this activity gets translated into experiences I take to the classroom and back to my research.
The synergy of the three is important. It propels me to learn outside the limits of my discipline's perspectives and constantly moves me into interdisciplinary learning situations. All this makes me a better learner, one who can continually and successfully learn with all the students with whom I interact, whether middle schoolers at a talk about archaeology, a first year college student taking my intro class, or a professional colleague debating a fine point about ceramic typology with me over a beer.
I really try hard to avoid teaching whenever possible.