May-June 2007

by Margaret A. Miller

In a previous life when I was an English professor, I was discussing Vietnam with a student. Somewhere in the course of that conversation, he told me that our killing babies in the war wasn’t as bad as it sounded, since the Vietnamese cared less about their children than we do. Appalled, I blurted out, “That strikes me as both racist and illogical.” He just shrugged. I had just used the two most condemnatory terms in my vocabulary (it wasn’t the most teacherly moment of my life), and he didn’t care.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the “soft” skills that students will need in their future lives as individuals, workers, and citizens. They include, for example, the capacity to collaborate with people from a range of backgrounds and cultures, which will require them to listen carefully and attentively; to speak precisely, knowledgably, and judiciously; and to use their knowledge of other cultures to behave with deep courtesy wherever they are.

But what we teach doesn’t matter at all unless students care. As Peter and Noreen Facione dramatized so well in their article about critical thinking in the last issue of Change, we want students to care enough about reason that they will apply standards of logic to their own most comfortable and comforting notions—and, as Elizabeth Minnich said in her wonderful article on judgment in the May/June 2006 issue of Change, to make both disciplined and flexible judgments. We also want them to care enough about other people (even people who don’t look like them) to exercise both personal and civic empathy.

If what we teach them is going to matter to them once the grades are in, they also need to have a curiosity persistent and strong enough to sustain them on the lifelong quest for learning, and they need to have caught a bit of the passion that fuels our study of literature or frogs or the reaches of the universe. Finally, if they’re going to be the people to whom we’ll be glad to entrust the future, we want them to be courageous and hard-working and ethical enough to act on what they know. In other words, we want them to look a lot like the winners of the 2007 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Awards, who are featured in this issue’s Listening to Students piece.

So how do we teach those dispositions? Part of it is surely through what we teach. In Adam Bede, George Eliot praises the ways in which realistic art, in its “faithful representing of commonplace things” cultivates “the secret of deep human sympathy.” The study of art and literature, as well as the social sciences, can also nurture in students the related capacity to see things from another person’s point of view (described so tellingly by one student whom Catherine Beyers and Gerald Gillmore quote in their article in this issue). Through their study of the natural and human world, students also have an opportunity to see how vast the world is beyond what George Eliot calls the “small, shivering self.” We hope that they’ll find something in that world to ignite their curiosity and excitement. 

But maybe dispositions are not really taught but caught. And then the question becomes, how well do we model them? Do we listen to each other and our students with the attentiveness that we want to cultivate in them? Do we speak with a genuine desire for exchange rather than to win an argument or demonstrate our importance? Do we model civility rather than its simulacrum, avoidance of conflict? Do we collaborate across all kinds of boundaries on problems that are too big and complex and urgent for anyone to solve alone (think of the Human Genome and International Polar Year projects), with true eagerness to learn from one another? And do we give students opportunities to do the same?

In his discussion of student transformation in this issue, Charles Foster tells the story of the art-history teacher whose class changed him profoundly. I had such a teacher. In my first semester at UCLA I took the course that probably most affected my life, Introduction to Music (thank you, Dr. Trotter, wherever you are.) He gave us a roadmap to classical music that has guided my musical journey to this day, and he taught us how to listen to music with an ear for
its intricacies.

But even more important, that man loved music, and he wanted us to love it too. At one point, he invited all 300 of us to come to his house, in shifts, where he had arranged for some friends to play chamber music for us. It was glorious. And somehow he conveyed how much music could matter, so that when my sister died that same semester, I found the perfect accompaniment to and solace for my grief sitting in his class listening to Beethoven’s violin concerto in D major.

I’m sure we all have such stories about transformative teachers, which is why many of us are in the academy. As Susan Gallagher points out at the end of her article on vocation in this issue, we don’t have to be training people for the clergy or working within a religious tradition to do that same service for our students.