Cooking up a class: teaching and learning from an undivided self. (Perspectives).

AS THE NUMBER OF DIVERSITY REQUIREMENTS in American institutions of higher education continues to grow, it is imperative to diversify faculty. But as Pruitt-Logan and Gaff (1999) state, "We cannot diversify faculty quickly enough. We must reeducate the existing faculty to understand issues of difference and to be able to work with this difference. It is everyone's responsibility to do so." What follows is a story of how an ethnic studies course was conceptualized outside of the "discipline," how an interdisciplinary teaching workshop was crucial to its development, and how connecting "self" to professional development was the most important step.

Creating a course

Parker Palmer (1998, 15) refers to teaching from the "undivided self": "In the undivided self every major thread of one's life experience is honored, creating a weave of such coherence and strength that it can hold students and subject as well as self. Such a self, inwardly integrated, is able to make the outward connections on which good teaching depends."

Creative power was unleashed while I was cooking my mother's recipe over eleven years ago and is still intense today. The story begins on a summer afternoon. That afternoon remains vivid in my memory. In the kitchen, with cool breeze and golden rays through the window, I stand at the stove cooking the main course for a dinner party that night for colleagues and friends from Albion College. The main course is stuffed eggplant, a recipe I had often eaten while growing up in New Orleans, but one I had never cooked before. It was my mother's recipe, the first of her recipes I tried to prepare since her death that winter. I remember trying to understand what her handwritten instructions on that small yellow page meant. I had to depend on my own interpretation since I could not call her on the phone to ask questions anymore. As the cooking progressed, familiar Creole smells were filling my Michigan kitchen. (1) I felt at a crossroads between my Louisiana past, and my future that was unfolding rapidly as I stood sti rring that pot.

Suddenly, just as Proust's famous experience of tasting the tea and madeleine put him in touch with childhood memories, the scents of the eggplant cooking reconnected me with my Louisiana heritage, merging past and present. I realized that I was literally at the beginning stages of designing a course on French Louisiana. Intuitively, I understood that this course would be very different from anything I ever taught, and I would tailor it to fulfill Albion College's new ethnicity requirement, a general education requirement in ethnic studies for all students.

As it turned out, this "opening up" of the curriculum provided me the chance to think about new ways of teaching and learning. Through designing and continuing to retool this course, I came to understand what Palmer meant. Each professor could have the makings of similar courses by carefully examining the unique space each occupies in the profession, i.e. the intersection of disciplinary training and lived experiences, his or her unique identity and personal passions.

When we expand our basis for developing new courses, shedding some of the limitations imposed by graduate school training, we begin to imagine other types of courses to teach through seeing what is missing from the curriculum. These courses are born from the connection forged between academic disciplines, the individual professor's perspectives, and corresponding institutional initiatives. That is to say, such courses live up to disciplinary and institutional standards, while at the same time including the professor's unique perspectives and understanding.

Designing a course

It is one thing to have a spark of an idea for a course, but it is a very different thing to actually design the course. One single reason why this spark of an idea materialized into an ethnic studies real course is my affiliation with the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) Course Design and Teaching Workshops where I serve as a staff member. For several years, I have had the privileged position of being part of a national, interdisciplinary conversation on issues related to teaching, course design, and multiculturalism.

The Course Design and Teaching Workshop is truly unique. Its core principle is that the teacher is integral not separate from his or her teaching, making the experience holistic. The workshop nurtures teaching from an undivided self, as it helps to further both self-knowledge and an understanding of cutting edge methodologies. It fosters creative tension as participants work through designing a course that exists at the intersection of self and discipline. During the week, work focuses on conceptualizing and designing the course, cognizant of the teacher's values and teaching/learning style, as well as how to reach all students who may enroll. This is not a modest enterprise!

In addition, participants teach segments of their course to one another, in the form of microteaching. Microteaching is a teaching lab where the instructor teaches a slice of the course to "students," i.e., other workshop participants and staff Debriefing and reflection about the lesson taught and the experiences of teaching/learning follow the teaching segment. Because of the diversity of disciplines and types of institutions represented, there is a lot of "cross-pollination" on both a conceptual and experiential level, relating to both course design and teaching. Typically, participants come away from the workshop with a renewed excitement about teaching, with a deeper commitment to reach all their students, and a much broader sense of what their course could include and where learning might take place.

The Course Design and Teaching Workshop offered me the opportunity to further conceptualize and design my French Louisiana course. I was able to work with others who helped me to understand more clearly what the course could and should be and what resource materials I might want to include. It also helped me understand what students' experiences in this brand new class might be. Then, I was able to test some theories, while learning from others who were in the throes of the same process and asking the same kinds of questions.

Course purposes

A central component of the course design process in the GLCA workshop requires participants to answer the complex question: What do you want your students to know, to do, to think, and to feel in this course? During the week, I arrived at answers that anchored the course on French Louisiana in important ways. First, I wanted my students to understand the Cajun language, as well as the history, culture, selected literature and music of French Louisiana. Ultimately, I realized I wanted students to do what they do in my other language and literature courses: Not only to learn about, but experience directly (i.e. not in translation) the culture and literature, as they operate within a French linguistic context in their readings, analyses, and discussions.

Another important goal is for students to develop strong analytical skills and the capacity to explain their analyses clearly to others regarding how Louisiana was indeed French. My goal was to have them finish the course thinking, as Cajun activists do, that Louisiana is as much a part of Francophonia as Quebec, Senegal, or Guadeloupe. At the same time I wanted them to recognize French Louisiana as distinctive in its cultural traditions and unique in its languages. Finally, I wanted them to feel an affinity to this French-American place and empathy for Cajun and Creole experiences. Thereby, I intended that they be empowered to examine ethnicities of other regions of the United States and to search for links to the past, through the same methods used in the seminar (see Lovell-Troy and Eickmann 1992).

After the workshop and at each step of course preparations, I remained committed to one operating principle: that the personal had to remain central to the course, holding it together. Nor could I forget that this course was born through my own Louisiana heritage and experiences with the GLCA Course Design and Teaching Workshops, not my disciplinary training. The challenge was to build upon my personal context and expand it in ways necessary to create a learning experience for all of my students.

Teaching the new course

When it was finally time to teach the course, it was more akin to a seafood gumbo, than the stuffed eggplant dish that inspired it all, with the main ingredients remaining separate and distinct, yet held together by a deep, rich roux. The main ingredients of the course were contemporary Cajun poetry, Cajun folktales, Cajun and Zydeco music from their origins to the present, nineteenth and twentieth century Creole New Orleans texts, and other texts and videos drawing from history, sociology, literary criticism, and anthropology. The roux consisted of addressing questions of identity and ethnicity, focusing on the evolving French "Other," in the larger Anglo-American context. The French Other is both foreign to the myth of the American melting pot and a unique product of the specific, yet evolving, cultural, geographical, and linguistic contexts of South Louisiana. The course not only satisfied the ethnic studies requirement for graduation, but was also part of our French curriculum. It was, as a consequence, t aught in French as an upper-level course, having as a pre-requisite at least four semesters of college French.

Experiential component

The paradox of teaching from an undivided self is that the usual parameters of teaching soon began to feel confining. Because I was teaching a course inspired by my own lived experiences, I wanted my students to learn from their own direct experiences in Louisiana, as well. Having the students experience South Louisiana directly, in the form of fieldwork, I realized, was absolutely necessary.

In planning the itinerary for the trip, I had to consider how experiences in situ related to course goals: what I wanted my students to know, to do, to think, and to feel. Through traveling to South Louisiana, they would come to know this area on multiple levels, not just intellectually. What they understood through class discussions and readings would prepare them to experience this southern land directly through their senses, their cultural encounters with its people, and the bonds and connections they would forge individually.

During their travels I wanted students to immerse themselves in their surroundings. This meant walking the streets, touring the bayous, dancing in the dance halls, visiting French immersion classrooms, going to the Mardi Gras, engaging in meaningful discussion with authors and cultural activists we had studied in the course, and having the language of these encounters be in French whenever possible. It also meant taking advantage of the libraries, bookstores, and other places where they would find needed sources for their individual research projects.

What I expected the students to think was how dynamic, unique, and multifaceted South Louisiana is. This would occur during the trip through sustaining a delicate balance between exploring new areas and setting aside time to reflect on their experiences--especially in the form of journal writing. I hoped that reflection on the variety and complexity of their experiences would be like a gumbo simmering, allowing them to see how each ingredient, at first distinct, over time blends with all the other flavors into a unique, rich, and textured dish. Finally, I wanted the students to feel empowered and unafraid as they ventured into this new land.

The timing of the trip was an important consideration, as well. In thinking about the course in terms of Friere's model for a fully realized learning experience--his pedagogy of theory, praxis, and reflection--I understood the fieldwork to represent the praxis component of the course. Students needed the opportunity to break the boundaries of distance and engage directly in the experience of French Louisiana. The middle of the semester would allow students to engage in Friere's final element in learning, reflection, while still in the class.

What students learned

I have had the opportunity to teach this course three different times to date, and the last time, enrollment was three times that of my other upper-level courses. Students have learned a lot--not a surprising fact, given that they all knew so little about this place and its heritage beforehand. However, the most striking aspect of their learning is the deep affinity that the majority of the students now have with South Louisiana. To some degree they feel that they possess hidden treasures of knowledge that remain elusive for others. They see themselves as Knowers, especially those who have traveled to Louisiana as part of the course. I believe that this is because the course brings together a foreign language, French, and contemporary American social issues, allowing students to connect two apparently disparate areas in a meaningful way. As Knowers they have organized projects to help teach others about this region and its people, in the form of curricular activities such as organizing a Louisiana Fais Do-Do and by conducting research projects, such as an honors thesis on the novel, Louisiane.

What the teacher learned

Because this course is unique, there has been a fair amount of interest and curiosity on the home front. I have shared my research with several interested colleagues and given a variety of guest lectures on French Louisiana to students, parents, and alumni of Albion College, as well as in area schools and organizations. In discussing the course with colleagues, I have been struck by what has emerged as a typical response: Many wish they had a course like this to teach. What they have not realized is that I did not have this course to teach; I made this course to teach. This Louisiana course is not a store-bought, pre-packaged commodity, but homemade with each ingredient gathered from the varied experiences of one's professional life.

Each professor has the "makings" of similar courses if he or she would carefully examine the unique talents, perspectives, and experiences that he or she brings to teaching. These elements already are operational, whether acknowledged or not, and informing every course we teach, although it is often difficult to articulate how.

A second lesson that I take away from this experience of teaching from the undivided self is that it not only can bring out our best teaching, but also our best research. So often in higher education we assume that teaching and research are opposing enterprises. While I understand the rationale for such claims, I cannot accept this binary opposition as absolute or all-encompassing. What is almost always left out of conversations on this topic is that we can learn in the classes we teach. Through expecting our students to engage in serious discussion in class, even at the undergraduate level, we can have the same type of epiphanies as our students when encountering "new" material.

In the French Louisiana class, there were several moments when my students taught me things that I had not understood or explored. I also paid attention to how they responded to the material, and that set me on new directions in my own research. For example, because I saw how much they were able to understand Cajun culture, identity, and social issues through reading and analyzing the poetry in Cris sur le bayou, I was haunted by the fact that this work was out of print. I could not accept the fact that a work so rich and important to the students, the class, and myself was at risk of being forgotten. I also found that there had been remarkably little research done on this important work, and that the research focused primarily on the anthropological importance of the poetry to the Cajun cultural renaissance, rather than on the literary merits of the poems. So it was a natural decision for me to research the poetry as literary text and analyze issues of identity and culture, continuing on a path already forge d in the course (1997).

A third lesson from this venture underscores the importance of multiculturalism in higher education. I am certain that Albion College's commitment to multicultural education was the necessary impetus for my creating this course. The GLCA Multicultural Course Design and Teaching Workshops enabled me to understand the importance of multicultural education as a means of expanding the knowledge base in our disciplines, as well as a way of posing academic questions from an interdisciplinary perspective. The power of multicultural education is that it focuses on content and pedagogy, on who the students are and who the professor is, on what has been included in the canon and what has been excluded. At its very foundation, multicultural education asks the questions "What is missing from the picture and why? Whose perspectives and voices are not included?" There are not simple answers to these questions. Rather, they require ongoing research and reflection.

This premise has had an important impact on how I approach this French Louisiana course, because I cannot operate under the assumption that the course design is ever all-encompassing, fully processed, and complete. This is in part due to the fact that every class travels to Louisiana, and the fullness of that experience, along with the ever-changing reality of the situation there, needs to be folded into the rest of the course during the second part of the semester. It is also because I am still grappling with some of the questions asked at the GLCA Course Design and Teaching Workshop.

Cooking one simple recipe has led to enormous long-term professional and personal growth. I have cooked several of my mother's recipes since then, and continue to learn from these experiences, in large part because I pay close attention to my thoughts and feelings as familiar, distant smells begin to fill the kitchen.

NOTES

(1.) Creole in the context of New Orleans refers to both European and African traditions. However, Creole in the context of Cajun culture refers to French speakers of African descent.

WORKS CITED

Guenin-Lelle, Dianne. 1997. The birth of Cajun poetry in Cris sur le bayou: Naissance d'une poesie acadienne en Louisiane. The French Review, 70:3, 439-451.

Lovell-Troy, L. and P. Eickmann. 1992. Course design for college teachers. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.

Palmer, Parker. 1998. The courage to teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher's Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Pruitt-Logan, Anne and Jerry Gaff.1999. Preparing future faculty to focus on diversity. Diversity Digest, 4:1

DIANNE GUENIN-LELLE is associate professor of French at Albion College.