Teaching and Reaching

“There is a lot of teaching that has for eons taken place outside of the classrooms. Recently more has occurred [in American schools],” said Douglas Dean Hesse of Illinois State University to open the panel, “ Faculty Roles in Student Learning beyond the Classroom,” at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention.

For example, the University of Miami has several residence halls that have live-in faculty members who interact with students in residence life programs. Margaret J. Marshall, a professor there, spoke on the panel about her experiences in the program. Marshall and her husband live in a residence hall, eat with students, have regular planned activities with students on the hall including faculty/fellow dinners that are planned by faculty and Resident Assistants (RAs).

“Most of my responsibility is informal, like helping point students to resources, reviewing paperwork and some advising,” said Marshall, adding that there are some formal responsibilities and many fun activities. One of the most important things faculty can learn from the experience is that “a huge part of college experience has nothing to do with the classroom—we don’t always consider that,” said Marshall.

Marshall thinks there are great benefits for the faculty and the students, although they can be hard to quantify. “I think first-generation college students benefit the most. I know much more about campus resources than I did before I moved in 2 years ago. We learn and live together,” explained Marshall.

Following her speech, Kelly Fisher Lowe of the University of Wyoming talked about the challenge of getting students to write. “I do think there is a need for a student-centered community—an intellectual community to show the students the importance of reading, writing and reasoning,” he said.

Lowe promoted the idea of writing across the curriculum (WAC) courses saying that students say they best learn to write when it is wrapped around other things. He suggested incorporating writing and library skills in freshman seminars dealing with adjustment and concurrently offering an academic seminar in which students can design their project. We need to deliberately package thing together like writing, science and philosophy to engage the students, said Lowe.

The third speaker was Katherine Durham Oldmixon who teaches at Huston-Tillotson College, the oldest historically black college in Texas. Oldmixon wears many hats at the school including working in the writing center, teaching British literature and world literature, and was asked by the school to create a writing program. She is also an artist, and when she came to Huston-Tillotson the arts had fallen away, with the exception of music.

A member of the community, Boyd Vance, who directed Pro-Arts Collective wanted to get involved at the college and Oldmixon sought his help in putting on a black adaptation of The Tempest. This spurred many more joint ventures which helped her students discover talents they didn’t realize they had, connect with people from different backgrounds and help ease racial tensions in the neighborhood, according to Oldmixon.

Julia A. Seymour is a staff writer for Accuracy in Academia.