M A R G O . P E R K I N S

The following feature story appeared in the campus publication Mosaic in December, 1995.

Margo Perkins

Asking the right questions

Margo Perkins watches carefully for opportunities to draw her students more deeply into her courses. This fall, for example, Perkins, who is in her first semester as an assistant professor of English and American studies, has been teaching a course called "Autobiography and the Black Power Movement," which explores the work of civil rights activists Angela Davis, George Jackson and Malcolm X, among others.

When Yarel Silverio '96 mentioned that the Hartford Stage Company was staging a reading of a play about Lolita Lebrun, a Puerto Rican nationalist who was involved in a shooting incident in the U.S. Capitol in the 1950s, Perkins saw a clear connection to the subject material of the course. She spontaneously asked her students whether they would like to attend the reading.

The classs responded enthusiastically and the College arranged the trip. Silverio says it was personally rewarding for her to attend the performance-she herself is a Latina and interested in the little-known activist-but the experience also brought together a number of historical strands for all of the students in the course, and stimulated energetic discussion

Encouraging Critical Thinking
Perkins' teaching style is flexible and creative. Warm, earnest, and hardworking, Perkins earned a bachelor's degree from Spelman College in Atlanta and master's and doctoral degrees from Cornell University. "She's someone whom we expect to show leadership, especially in the American studies area," says Ron Thomas, chair of the English department, who worked with Jim Miller, director of the American studies program, to hire Perkins.

In the classroom, students, like Yarel Silverio, assert that Perkins "knows her stuff." But, with careful calculation, Perkins usually lets students do most of the talking. Perkins wants her classes to struggle with the hard-hitting subjects of race, class, and gender. But rather than imposing her own views, she tries to find creative ways of introducing these issues. Asking the right question is usually the key.

"When we discuss a work, I'll try to put out the sort of question that, for example, men usually respond to in certain ways," Perkins said. That typically causes women to realize that they have a different perspective, which in turn provokes a discussion from a number of viewpoints

Using Collaboration to Teach Writing
When Perkins teaches writing to first-year students, she often begins with collaborative projects. This fall, for example, she divided a class into four groups, each of which then researched a particular aspect of the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power facility in the Ukraine. The groups then made presentations to the rest of the class as a "teach-in."

One goal of the project was to introduce the students to research. But Perkins also feels that collaborative work makes it easier for students to speak before their peers. She also wants to guide them gently toward critical thinking. If students begin by discussing and writing about a controversial subject that is a bit removed from them-taking place in another country, for example-Perkins reasons, they will subsequently be more willing to apply those same critical thinking and writing skills to their own lives and to areas closer to home.

Beyond the classroom, Perkins' scholarly goals include continuing with her scholarship on autobiography and more involvement in community activities both on and off campus. At Cornell, she participated in the Tompkins County Task Force for Battered Women and in the Ithaca Black Women's Empowerment Group. She is most interested in issues of gender politics and women's empowerment and is only beginning to learn about the opportunities for addressing those issues through student groups, campus committees, and organizations in Hartford.

When Perkins speaks about her students, her respect for them and commitment to them are obvious. "These students will go on to have important positions in society," she says, which is why it is so imperative to her that they learn how to "make an argument and substantiate it." There are computer programs that can catch spelling and even grammar errors, she says with a chuckle, "but I don't know of any that can fix logic."

- Leslie Virostek

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