Teaching, American-Style, in Poland

Recently the Polish journalist Witold Szabłowski of Gazeta Wyborcza came to my home university, Ohio State, in Columbus, Ohio.

When he discovered that I spent the recent spring semester teaching in Warsaw, he was fascinated. “How did you find Polish students?” he asked.

And I got to thinking. My courses at the Studium Europy Wschodniej (Center for Eastern Europe) gave me the opportunity to teach out of two of my recent books. With my undergraduate students, I taught a course entitled War in 20^th Century Russian Culture, and we considered everything from poetry and novels to films, memoirs and monuments in the Russian and Polish experiences of war in the 20^th century.

This was a fairly small class, almost a seminar, and I had the students reading chapters of my Chapaev and his Comrades: War and the Literary Hero across the 20^th Century (Academic Studies Press, 2012), so they had the opportunity to practice many of their English-language skills: reading, summarizing, participating in discussions, and presenting their own opinions and research. They were sophisticated analysts of Russian and Polish culture, and they brought their own experiences and family histories into the classroom. I learned from them as well, especially about how Russian and Polish WWII sites are perceived today. Two examples were the Soviet WWII cemetery—where one of my students had regularly gone running as a schoolboy—and the “Four Sleeping Soldiers” monument in Praga. 

Opinions varied on what should be done with these lieux de memoire  (what Pierre Nora calls “sites of memory”), but it was fascinating that we were able to have an animated discussion of this and other topics, despite the varying skills of the students in English communication.

My master’s-level course, with students from Poland and from all over the former Soviet Union—Armenia, Belorus, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine—was an entirely different experience. Upwards of 60 people enrolled, but I didn’t get to know them personally, because only 25-30 of them showed up in any given week, and it was often a different 25-30 than the last time. Perhaps because of its size, the course turned into virtually straight lecture, with me in the front, pacing with my microphone, while students sat quietly.

It’s not that their English was any worse than that of my undergraduates. But most were probably too shy to speak up. We were almost all fluent in Russian, and I can even understand much of what they might have said in Polish, but the Studium and I were both adamant that this course should take place in English, and that was already a barrier to any participation.

My goal was to give the students a taste of American-style teaching. Most of their other professors were men in their 50s, 60s or even 70s, and I was something completely unexpected for them.  My style is conversational, and I probably speak English a bit too quickly for them to follow me easily. But I had power point slides on the screen to support what I was saying, and my lectures also followed the reading they were supposed to be doing at home of primary literature and articles from my edited volume Madness and the Mad in Russian Culture (Toronto 2007). Some of the primary texts were ones they had read at school or had seen exhibited at museums—everything from Pushkin’s “Bronze Horseman” and Queen of Spades to Repin’s “Ivan the Terrible and his Son” to Chekhov’s “Ward No. 6” to Ilya Kabakov’s The Madhouse, or Institute of Creative Research—and the articles engaged topics that were politically and socially relevant. I was happy to slow down, or repeat myself, and I stopped to ask them questions throughout the lecture.

But I did not get much participation. Because they insisted that they couldn’t hear me properly in our 19^th century reconstructed salon classroom if I didn’t use the mike, I ended up feeling like a talk show host with a very quiet and reluctant audience. Eventually the same four or five students would occasionally speak—mostly the Russians or Lithuanians.

Though I had aspirations of letting the students experience American-style teaching, I really wanted them to engage with it, not just watch it as performance art. But they mostly didn’t. My impression was that they wanted me to talk for 90 minutes once a week, and they would take notes, or not. They might very well have preferred to end the course with an oral exam in which they repeated back to me what I had said—education as it was during Soviet times.

Witold told me that the literature teacher in the provincial town where he grew up had given him Cs every term—not because his writing was bad (after all, he is now a published and translated journalist, so he probably had some skills even then), but because he insisted on writing his own thoughts and opinions rather than regurgitating hers. “That’s what I wanted!” I exclaimed. “To hear their ideas!” He also told me about an opportunity he had as a student to study in Denmark. Half his group on the program were Danish, and the other half East European, and the contrast between the self-confidence and chattiness of the Danish group and the East European group was stark. His half was too shy to speak up: they were either incapacitated when asked questions, or reluctant to say anything that wasn’t brilliant and incisive. Whereas the Danes were happy to utter any old thing—and though he was shocked at the occasional banality, he was impressed by their poise and confidence.

Ukrainian historian Igor Todorov gave
 a lecture in my classroom in May.

Most of my MA students really didn’t want to do any research or independent writing. In fairness, their schedule was overloaded; they were taking upwards of 13 courses, so they did not have time to do proper research. But as I told Witold, the process of independent reading and research and of engaging with a lecturer, questioning, expressing one’s own opinions and taking responsibility for them—all of this is part of what it takes to be a grownup. And that engagement, that need to take responsibility for what one is getting out of the course, to be active in a learning environment, was missing among the Poles.

How do such students go on to become adults? I asked him. To do good work in the world, you need to gather information, question, analyze, predict, make mistakes, try again. Those are all skills I was hoping to help my students work on over the course of my American-style semester. Instead, in the final papers they reluctantly wrote, I mostly got rephrasing of what I had said in lecture.

Polish education, Witold maintains, is in need of reform. And that may be true. The passivity I witnessed in my classroom will not help the students become active, engaged citizens after graduation.

What I’m hoping is that my Fulbright students—who may have wished I were teaching in the way they were used to—will continue to contemplate that American style and to think about how they might have learned differently in Spring 2013. Perhaps my expertise—in my books, in the classroom, in written comments engaging with what work they did turn in—will have an effect on them long term. I can only hope so.

They certainly had an effect on me. Both the experience of teaching Polish students, undergraduate and graduate, and the opportunity to interact with staff and faculty at the Studium (and throughout the university, for example at the faculty of Artes Liberales, where I had an utterly different experience with students and staff), have made a difference in how I think about education and about Poland. I would love to teach that Fulbright semester all over again, and I wonder if now I would have better results.