Dean of the Faculty Rena Fraden's
Address to the Faculty
“Scenes of Instruction”
A year after my arrival in Hartford, my books finally unpacked, I’ve been able to turn from my standards when in need of direction – Thoreau and Emerson and Dickinson – those whom I take with me wherever I go – to the more eclectic set of authors, introduced to me since college, recommended to me by friends or colleagues, or ones I just happened to have stumbled across and which have become for me secondary primary voices. A thin collection of essays, Proofs & Theories, by the poet Louise Glück served as my touchstone these past few days as I struggled with the composition of this address. In an essay I have often given to students she writes:
The fundamental experience of the writer is helplessness. This does not mean to distinguish writing from being alive: It means to correct the fantasy that creative work is an ongoing record of the triumph of volition, that the writer is someone who has the good luck to be able to do what he or she wishes to do: to confidently and regularly imprint his being on a sheet of paper. But writing is not decanting of personality. And most writers spend much of their time in various kinds of torment: wanting to write, being unable to write; wanting to write differently, being unable to write differently. In a whole lifetime, years are spent waiting to be claimed by an idea. The only real exercise of will is negative: we have toward what we write the power of veto. – Louise Glück
As I met my first-year seminar class, wondered about their first days at Trinity, watched their add/dropped courses fly across my computer screen on a minute by minute basis, and read their first papers, I felt acutely my own helplessness and presumed to think I knew something of their own. I’m sure there are writers just as there are teachers and even first year students who do not struggle in their lives, who are confident teachers, and triumphant students and whose will and wish are always realized. . . but I am not and was not one of them.
A year ago in my first address to you, Emerson and Thoreau’s extreme self-reliance bolstered my courage as I sketched out the goals of my first year: to hire a nationally recognized scholar in urban/global studies and to propose changes in the general education program that would encapsulate our collective intellectual aims. I knew going into that year that it would be easy for you to assess whether and to what extent those goals were achieved. Either we hired or we didn’t, either we got a set of initiatives to the floor of the faculty or not, either we voted things in or not; and either the conversations we had would bring us closer together or pull us further apart. My sense is that we have been fortunate, even, may I say, in some respects, triumphant. Extraordinarily triumphant in finding Xiangming Chen and persuading him to join and help lead us in establishing the connections between our urban and global curricular mission; and likewise fortunate to be able to bring to the faculty a set of curricular initiatives that gave us the opportunity to think about what matters to each of us, to exchange our views, and to assemble enough of a majority to pass a core global, second language, and intensive writing requirements, with the breadth of the liberal arts endorsed. The conversations we had over the course of the year taught me a great deal about our sharp differences, but those same conversations made it apparent to me that we share a belief in something far more important than our differences: we believe in the small transactional scene of instruction – the classroom, lab, or stage, on the field and in the field – which allows us to guide our students personally in ways that are an unique feature of the liberal arts college in the United States.
The outcome of teaching is not like the outcome of a search (the offer accepted or not) or an initiative (voted up or down) since we know there is a delay mechanism that can always kick in, as students coming back for their 10th or 20th reunion stop by to tell us that only just yesterday did some unconsidered aside we made about Picasso or the property of light come back to them at the Met or in a blackout. It is not so easy to track the successes and failures of teaching. Teaching, like writing, is completely personal, and impossible to mimic at any fundamental level. One’s personal style is one’s own. And yet, over the years, I’ve become convinced that there are more and less effective ways of being who you are, and that others can help us figure out how to be better than we are, even within our own separate spheres.
So this year, the challenge for me – for all of us – is to find the right settings for conversations that will allow us to thrash out our beliefs about the art and craft of teaching and emerge better teachers for it; to figure out how best to transmit what we say is core to our students; to track what we do now to make sure we are doing it well. As I sit in my office a few minutes before class and consider whether I am teaching writing intensively (not to mention effectively), I wish desperately for a sign from others that this is what we expect from our students to know at the end of this semester, and this is how I might think about teaching it. Should they know the sign of the possessive and never mistake it ever again? How many pages should I expect them to write? Should I ask them to do more? Are my expectations too low? I am absolutely convinced that when it comes to writing, we can have profitable discussions within departments as well as with all instructors in the first-year program and establish shared expectations and values. How are our students doing? Should we look at test scores on LSATs and MCATs and GREs, the numbers who apply for graduate fellowships, the numbers who go on to work for the government or become artists? How do we know that what we taught contributed to those scores or those choices? How can we figure out what to do better.
I know that conversations like these already take place between friends, even between senior and junior faculty, sometimes in the Writing or Math Center, sometimes around technology, sometimes in departments or Community Learning Initiatives. I want to make sure that these conversations are taking place so that everyone is involved. I’ve already asked the chairs to discuss with their departments optimal course sizes and whether any of our departments or faculty are teaching beyond a pedagogically optimal ratio; and then I also want to hear about the shared expectations, the pages we expect students to read, the concepts we expect them to learn. I will be hosting dinners at my house to talk about the experiences of teaching, but I’m also thinking ahead about what a Teaching and Learning Center would look like at Trinity, what and who and how we might profitably lodge conversations there.
As we move forward, hiring the best trained junior and senior faculty (in chemistry, political science, engineering, economics, psychology, and religion this year), who will surely have the most stake in this place and will do the most to transform its practices; as we plan for new facilities in the sciences and the arts; as President Jones and I pledge to commit dollars to support your research, I want also to ensure that what continues to distinguish the liberal arts college from that of research universities is our ability to provide small classes and personal attention in which the scene of instruction is carefully, and even, I would enjoin us, in some respects, communally calibrated.
In closing, may I say once more how fortunate I feel to be here at this moment in Trinity’s history, to see the capital campaign so strongly underway, to be able to plan for new buildings, to bring a new center to campus, and simply to return to the rhythm of teaching and research, the life of the mind embodied here on our small hill in Hartford. There may be a certain quality of helplessness always in our creative acts, and years spent waiting for an idea we can claim, so it is good, I think, very good indeed, to be surrounded by so many . . . whose moment may have just come, whose idea has been just claimed . . . and who can help us through the wait to a brief moment of triumph.