Learning about Teaching through Intercampus Mentorship

In recent months, we have been featuring guest blogs from participants in the Rackham-CRLT Intercampus Mentorship Program. You can learn more about the program--open to any U-M graduate student or postdoc--by following this link. In today's post, English Language and Literature Ph.D. student Adam Mazel reflects upon the crucial lessons about teaching that he learned from observing his mentor at nearby Albion College teach Melville's Moby Dick. 

I first met Jess Roberts, Associate Professor of English at Albion College, in 2008, when she guest lectured on American women poets in a graduate seminar I was taking here at Michigan.  I did not know then that four years later, I would contact Jess to ask her to mentor me as part of the Rackham-CRLT Intercampus Mentorship program.  But when I saw her on the list of possible mentors, I was excited.  I knew that there was no one I would rather work with.  When she agreed to mentor me, I was through the roof.

Since then, our meetings have taken a number of forms: from discussions over coffee regarding how to manage the hardships of the humanities job market, to visits to Albion to observe her teach.  I single out these latter meetings as particularly helpful.  I entered Michigan’s PhD program in English never having taught—or even tutored—before.  For that reason, I have sought out any opportunity I could to practice my teaching.  Having already experienced Jess in a Michigan classroom, I knew that I could learn a lot from observing her Albion classroom.  I was right.

One classroom visit, in particular, stands out to me.  In November 2012, I observed Jess teach Melville’s Moby-Dick to a seminar of freshman and sophomores, most of whom were non-English majors.  How was she going to excite these young skeptics about one of the most complex novels ever published, I wondered?

What I learned is that even the most estranging novels can be made relevant to today’s students—without sacrificing their complexity—if you ask the right questions.  Jess surprised me by starting off the discussion by asking, “How is the Pequod (Ahab’s ship) like Albion?” “How are the shipmates like students?”  In other words, “How can we use Moby-Dick to better understand our college, its roles and functions, and our roles in its community as students and teachers?”  At first I doubted the complexity of the questions, but the students proved my hasty misgivings unfounded.  Through the flurry of answers that had the classroom humming with electricity, I witnessed the students’ excitement for applying the novel to their own lives.  Jess is right: as she is fond of saying, Moby-Dick can indeed answer any question we have.

Jess certainly answered some of the questions I have: specifically, about how to excite students and get them to engage with forbidding texts, and, more broadly, about how to teach.  She offered me a new perspective on pedagogy—one that finds ways to make what might seem forbidding, welcoming.  I’m excited to keep learning from her as a participant in the Intercampus Mentorship program and I look forward to our meetings to come.

To learn more about the Rackham-CRLT Intercampus Mentorship Program, see the mentorship program website. For other participants' stories, click on the Mentorship tag below--and check back for more in the coming weeks.