Center for Teaching & Learning Podcast Transcript

Marisa Parham’s “Reflections on Teaching”

April 11, 2019
Duration: 00:08:18

[Instrumental music by Walter Kitundu]

 SARAH: Hello and welcome. My name is Sarah Bunnell. I'm the Associate Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning here at Amherst College. And I am pleased to be sitting here today with Dr. Marisa Parham, Professor of English and the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Officer here at the College. Thank you so much, Marisa, for being with me today.

MARISA:  Thank you for having me.

SARAH:  So, one of the big themes that I heard as you were talking about your goals for teaching and your goals for students, were both in terms of helping students develop leadership skills, particularly those students who don't necessarily step comfortably into a leadership role and also helping them develop compassion and kindness. Could you just say a little bit more about why you think leadership and kindness are important attributes to try to cultivate in Amherst College students?

 MARISA:  First, I think the leadership thing. So, part of talking to them about leadership is also about helping them better understand what constitutes leadership. So really thinking about what it means to really want to take, have a strong hand in building communities and supporting people. And in sort of really being careful about being able to think of one's own positionality in relationship to the work you do. Like when you're really playing the long game, it's really about sort of how you're living and what you're enabling for other people. Right? And so, I think getting students to that place as quickly as possible is really important. Within a year or two of graduating, they are probably going to be in some kind of major leadership position.  So, anything that helps them more quickly understand what it means to have to take responsibility for their own behavior and also to build communities where people can be their best selves becomes the thing. Pretty imperative actually.

 [00:02:00]

 SARAH:  That seems so powerful and also a really powerful model that you're projecting to students about the fact that they are learners, but they are also leaders, and that the kindness and compassion needs to, to frame all of that work. You spoke a lot about the importance of also cultivating that in yourself, that part of what you do in your teaching is think about how can I balance my goals for students and my goals for learning and teaching with the other things that you have as part of your professional life. So how do you also make room for scholarship? How do you make room for travel? How do you make room for self and the humanness of yourself?

 MARISA:  I've learned to be more communicative about sort of what I have to offer, what I can bring to any space and also when I'm not able to bring any space and you know, not in a combative or confrontational way, but just making it very clear that, you know, even with diversity and inclusion, like I'll say,  “I'm here to do a job, I have goals, I'm here to meet those goals. That's what I'm here for.” And actually going to do that in the classroom too and helping students. And I think it's really good going back almost to the leadership thing, it's really important for them to be able to see us as whole people.

 SARAH:  So, the importance of being very transparent in making those connections and bridges and also articulating expectations and what is a reasonable expectation from you, a level of commitment and where are the boundaries of that. That seems incredibly important. How would you recommend that faculty do that early in their career as teacher-scholars?

 MARISA:  The best advice I ever got was when I first got here from a retired colleague, Dale Peterson, who was in English and Russian. And he taught me a lot about the sort of transparency thing, and to really frame those moments as strengths. Like with students, they have to figure out who faculty are and what faculty do. And our only model prior to this of course is going to be high school and high school teachers are actually something quite different from what a professor is, but there's no one ever who would have ever told them that. [SARAH:  Right.] Right. So, I think being able to articulate, sort of, what the kinds of things you have to do as a professor, and to make sure they understand that teaching is only one part of your life. But it's saying, “I stay current in my field, I go to conferences, I publish, I do all of these things so that I can be better for you.”

 [00:04:32]

 SARAH:  So, in terms of speaking about or thinking about a balanced life and and thinking about professional roles and identities, you wear a lot of hats on campus, and one of them is the Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Officer for our campus. I wonder if that work, where that role that you play on campus influences the way that you think about your teaching at all?

 MARISA:  It does. I mean it's really...I mean it's interesting because I think in my role, which has a lot to do about, or has a lot to do with, talking to faculty and staff around just, you know, frankly a lot of it’s just grievance, a lot of it is complaint and I mean that as a pos…  I think complaint is a positive thing to be clear, you know, I have to be clear how it sounds like, but I think complaint is really good and healthy. And it's interesting, I think, to do that work with faculty and staff and they go back to the classroom and hear student complaint, um, and realize they're often the same. [Sarah: Hmm. That’s interesting.] And that's one of the most important lessons I think I've learned. I'll bring it here to an Amherst context specifically. There's not that much variation between student complaint and faculty and staff complaint. And I think that's actually one, a good thing. And two, because I think it's easy to pathologize student complaint. [Sarah:  Right.] Iit also begins to help me understand the things that were just systemic. [Sarah:  Right.] And I bring a lot of that to the classroom.

 [00:06:13]

 SARAH:  My final question for you is in looking forward, so thinking about your own hopes and aspirations for your whole self and your whole identity as a teacher. Do you have something that you hope that you accomplish for yourself or for your students related to your teaching in the next five years or so on campus?

 MARISA:  I think I'm always trying to find ways to be able to deliver more kinds of opportunity more effectively. You know, as faculty is always so hard because you kind of want to go all-in on your courses with students, but you know, supposedly they're always taking like three other classes with people who want them to go all-in on their courses. [Sarah:  I have heard that that's true.] Yes. So, I've been trying to really pull back, like to find a way to simultaneously pull back in terms of not overloading students. So, they get more out of less, if that makes sense. [Sarah:  Absolutely.] So, you know, I think during my teaching talk I talked for instance about doing really complex, very new-for-most-students assignments around building a video game, for instance, but then trying to remove a level of sort of terror and pain around that by removing grading. So, just trying to figure out how to simultaneously scale up and scale back so that they're doing projects that require investment and care but don't actually have to be tied into other structures that produce stress unnecessarily.

 [00:07:46]

 SARAH:  Well, I think that connects back to all of those threads that you've been pulling together through our conversation that in thinking about how do you make your teaching more high impact, more efficient, how do you model that for students as they move forward as learners, as leaders, as compassionate whole people, and recognizing that doing more is not necessarily doing better.

 [Instrumental music by Walter Kitundu]

 SARAH:  Thank you so much, Marisa.

 MARISA:  Thank you. It's so nice to talk to you about this.