May 2001 University Reporter

by Jeffrey Mitchell

“It can be a lonely experience, standing up there in front of thirty or forty students, trying to figure out the way to excite them about learning,” says Esther Kingston-Mann. “None of us learned that in graduate school. We learned it through our own reflections and our own experiences, but also through collaboration with each other.”

Together with Tim Sieber of the Anthropology Department, Kingston-Mann (History and American Studies) is a co-editor of a newly published collection of essays, Achieving Against the Odds: How Scholars Become Teachers of Diverse Students. The “us” she speaks of are eleven current and former UMass Boston faculty members whose work appears in the collection, and also hundreds of colleagues who have joined their efforts to make university teaching more effective and meaningful.

The contributors to the new book, in addition to Sieber and Kingston-Mann, are Kathleen Sands (Study of Religion), Reyes Coll-Tellechea (Hispanic Studies), Castellano Turner (Psychology), Vivian Zamel (English), Peter Nien-chu Kiang (American Studies and Education), Louis Rudnick (American Studies and English), Winston Langley (Political Science), Estelle Disch (Sociology), and Pancho Savery (formerly of the UMass Boston English Department, now at Reed College). It will be available in May from Temple University Press.

Achieving Against the Odds addresses a multitude of subjects, from issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the classroom to strategies for teaching students with differing levels of academic preparation. But the title of Sieber’s essay—“Learning to Listen to Students and Oneself”—expresses a recurring theme.

Like so many UMass Boston students, the authors themselves come from “untraditional” backgrounds. “All of us learned from our own experience of being from a marginalized social group, or a group that wasn’t usually represented in higher education,” says Kingston-Mann. But for every faculty member—regardless of background—“the issue is trying to understand who your students are, not taking it for granted that your student’s experience is just like yours.”

Another lesson is just as important. “It’s hard to figure all of this out by yourself,” says Kingston-Mann. “You’re better off once you begin having conversations with other teachers.” Such conversations have been nourished for years by UMass Boston’s Center for the Improvement of Teaching, though such activities as semester-long seminars on teaching in which some 220 UMass Boston faculty members have now taken part. The center also sponsors publications and annual conferences on transformative teaching, the most recent of which involved faculty from 20 institutions.

Kingston-Mann hopes that a New England Center for Inclusive Teaching will soon be established, to serve as a forum for innovative teachers—as Achieving Against the Odds already does. “I think the discourse and debate in higher education about teaching, accountability, and standards have been pretty much dominated by the large research universities,” she says. “But from my perspective, teaching has been at the forefront longer at urban commuter institutions like UMass Boston. So it seems really important to me to have the voices of faculty at these institutions—and of our students—become part of the discussion.”

New Book Explores Transformative Teaching

by Jeffrey Mitchell