Making Connections in Berlin

The most salient issue I took away from Berlin's description of the lower-level course was how friggin hard it looked. I love teaching and I love students. And I don't mean the following comment disparagingly to them, but rather as a critique of Berlin: My students have trouble understanding the idea that a paragraph is only about one thing. And If I stand up there and say that today we are going to discuss “the relation of current signifying practices to the structuring of subjectivites . . . to negotiate and resist . . . hegemonic discourses” (124), I feel that maybe it wouldn't go over so well. I guess my real problem was with the disconnect between rhetoric of the entire chapter, which has wonderful and much-needed ideas about ways to make student more critical written in such lofty and lovely prose and the way students really are. Miller points this out, as does Harkin (though I cringed at her phrase “postmodern Hoosier rhetor”). Good pedagogy begins where the students are and with what they know, and I can't help but wonder if Berlin sees students only as he'd like them to be.

This is related to another problem I saw in Berlin's descriptions of the ideal English departments. He seems to think that the only way we can see connections between lit, creative writing, rhet/comp, etc. is if we are in classes that integrate them all. That to me means that the teacher is the one with the knowledge of the connections, and we just sit there and learn them by way of her brilliant, integrated pedagogy. But doesn't that preclude us from taking distinct classes in each of those disciplines and making the connections ourselves? I'm thinking specifically of a paper I wrote for George Justice's 18th cent Brit lit class spring of last year. At the same time, I was in Marty Townsend's WAC class, and I wrote my paper for Dr. Justice about how to use write-to-learn strategies I'd read about in the WAC class to teach Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. I worry that in Berlin's ideal English department, Prof. Justice and Townsend would, say, team teach, so we could all interrogate each other's texts. But I wanted to make those connections myself, which was only possible by learning from different teachers with different specialties in separate classes. I guess what I'm really concerned about here is how much a Berlinian teacher has to make connections for the students, by juxtaposing reading assignments, by bumping text production and history up against each other, and how much the students are allowed to do it themselves.