The Professor Is In now says that this phrase has been overused to death. And while there have been times that teaching has inspired my research--teaching The Secret History and Flannery O'Connor's work together, for example, inspired a conference paper--generally the expectation with literature is that you teach things based on your current work, in order to spend more time with those texts in general.
Nevertheless, as I'm thinking through my new teaching statement, I'm struck by this statement in "Towards Desegregating Syllabuses: Teaching American Literary Realism and Racial Uplift Fiction" by Michele Birnbaum, that her essay assumes that "teaching is not simply the effluvia of research. In fact, we must consider the classroom as the source rather than the aftermath of critical practice."(1)
What does this mean, that teaching is not simply the effluvia of research? What happens if we consider the classroom the source of critical practice? I'm going to ponder this further, but I welcome comments here.
(1) Birnbaum, Michele. "Towards Desegregating Syllabuses: Teaching American Literary Realism and Racial Uplift Fiction." Teaching Literature: A Companion. Ed. Tanya Agathocleous and Ann C. Dean. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
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