2014 Award Winner

Winner of 2014 Aetna Graduate Teaching Award
George Moore
Teaching Philosophy

In my study of Renaissance literature, I often marvel at the way writers of this period melded together disparate texts to meet the demands of the cultural moment. I bring a similar spirit of intertextuality into the English classroom to combat the compartmentalization that often alienates young students from the educational process. During my four years of composition instruction at the University of Connecticut, I have found that students are most engaged with their education when they are invited to make connections across different fields of knowledge and, by extension, between coursework and topics of relevance to their own lives. It is in this mediation between classroom and lifeworld that students develop a critical awareness of their relation to academic work. It is my hope that such an awareness will erode the sense of arbitrariness that can come with assignments, especially in required classes.

This philosophy stems from the many happy accidents that have characterized my teaching experience. In my first semester of teaching, for instance, I eagerly assigned Othello only to have many of my students tell me Shakespeare is overrated and outdated. I was therefore pleasantly surprised when my students became engrossed in the play as they read. The reason was that they found a striking resonance between Othello and an assigned reading they took interest in earlier in the semester, Simone de Beauvoir’s theory of the woman as “other.” I learned that my students wanted to make a connection across essay units that initially seemed hermetically sealed. The work of intertextual connection went beyond the class as well, as many students wrote about Othello to explore topics they found personally interesting, such as theories of justice or the power relations experienced by minorities. At this early moment in my career, I learned that student excitement arose not so much from content learned in discrete bits, but, rather, from the discovery of connections between pockets of knowledge.

I believe that this approach is an especially valuable tool for challenging the false opposition modern education tends to create between the sciences and the humanities. This notion has propagated itself into several other false binaries: that one is born a “science person” or a “literature person,” that science is objective truth whereas the humanities are make-believe; that science is “straight-forward” whereas art is creative. Not only do such divisions occlude a more precise understanding of our world, but they threaten to limit the educational horizons of students. I saw this first-hand when teaching composition courses that I designed specifically for UConn’s Chemistry Learning Community. Many chemistry students entered the course with the sense that writing was just not for them because they were “science people” or “math people.” Yet most of these same students became outstanding essayists when, as a class, we began to interrogate the traditional opposition carved out between “creative” art and “objective” science. The brilliant literary memoirs of chemist Primo Levi, along with some reading on the history of science, helped us to reframe science as a human endeavor produced by active minds rather than by mechanistic observers. Already interested in problems such as the uncertainty principle, my students were eager to rethink the role that human subjectivity—with all of its capacity for error, creation, interpretation, and theorization—plays in the production of scientific knowledge. As my students deepened their understanding of the complexities of the scientific method, they simultaneously found that they could become participants in “humanistic” discussions about history, literature, and philosophy.

The intertextual approach I have advocated here must nonetheless be tempered with a scholarly attention to the unique nature of each course reading. An over-emphasis on how a literary text relates to life as we live it runs the risk of disregarding its alterity. Fortunately, I have found students like entering the world of the text as much as they like connecting the text to their worlds. I still fondly remember a moment last year in which my students and I simply had to laugh upon reading in The English Faust Book (a source for Marlowe’s play) that Doctor Faustus, among various hijinks, ate a bale of hay. By taking a moment to absorb ourselves into the oddness of this folkloric image, we developed the frame of mind needed to engage with the wild improbabilities of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus on their own terms. Indeed, it is through the balance between an attention to the text and intertextual connection that the best writing occurs. This is the process by which students find meaning in their work and in the work of others.

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