Prof. Sergi’s Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Some years ago, on my office door, I displayed an attractively-designed poster for an invited talk I was giving on medieval drama. Within a few days, a student of mine had scrawled Question Everything! messily next to my name, and then claimed responsibility, undemurely, a few days later.

I was delighted — not only because that phrase is a cornerstone of any good humanities pedagogy, but also because it had reappeared here as the defacement of such a slick image of scholarship. The humanities student must be trained to transgress: to find what the instructor does not see (in texts the instructor knows well), to interpret those findings in ways that exceed or challenge the instructor’s understanding, and to be evaluated on risky, exploratory excursions (i.e. “essays”) beyond the limits of what a syllabus can require expressly.

To the degree that my students enter the classroom thinking of themselves as my subordinates, my demands for them to transgress might easily register as contradictory, ignorant, or insincere. But I approach my students, graduate and undergraduate, as fellow scholars. My research in has turned increasingly to experiments in live performance; my graduate students have, in turn, become increasingly involved in those experiments, including a workshop I ran at York University, in which the three graduate students who are now working most closely with me welcomed the long-awaited opportunity to join me on the rehearsal-room floor and play-fight our way through a fragmentary Robin Hood script. In another recent case, one of the professional performers in my research productions was inspired to become a graduate student at the Centre for Medieval Studies, and studied alongside me intensively.

I share my research-in-progress with undergraduates too, asking them for help with my real questions. When I drill them in early English language skills, historical contexts, and practical staging logic, I make clear that I am giving them tools with which they can help me answer those questions. Good close readings by inexperienced scholars are a genuine resource for me: medieval drama studies is a field of cobwebs, in need of new ideas and fresh analyses, in which a lack of prior familiarity with the texts is often an asset, offering rewards to readers disenchanted with hegemonic interpretations of the past. My classes expose students to raw archives and untranslated texts, and to the most uneven, unsure scholarly discussions surrounding them — through which the intense, clear-eyed study of a selected textual detail can cut truly new paths. I embolden my student close readers with the real possibility of impact on my field, challenging them to care less about following instructions than about revising received histories of performance and language for their own sake.

My classes, inspired by the work of Paulo Freire, present scholarship as an active, liberating dialogue, in which my students and I are fellow interlocutors, part of a discursive network that stretches across the many levels of the university and outward through the surrounding community. I draw attention to the looser ends of that network, where students might improve, destabilize, or restructure the discourse in real, lasting ways. Students’ provocations in class discussion determine the course of my subsequent lectures. I insist in class that student essays can, and must aim to, shift the professor’s understanding of a subject, if only a little; I reserve grades above 80 for the undergrad papers that actually do so. (My classes are difficult. Any positive student feedback I receive is hard-earned.) My lecture slides have accumulated multiple citations of past students’ writing, usually correctives to what I had been teaching, providing examples for future students to make similar interventions in the curriculum. A few student citations, undergraduates included, appear in the footnotes to my own academic writing. The many students who take more than one of my classes, or who return to my office to continue a conversation across semesters, demonstrate remarkably high retention levels, another long-lasting effect of our work. (I love repeat offenders—in winter 2019, I discovered that half of the students in my ENG 331 course had taken a course of mine before!)

I take for granted that students will enter my English classes with cynical preconceptions about the value and relevance of humanities scholarship. I believe that those preconceptions, combined with the creeping mechanization and monetization of higher education, create an environment increasingly oppressive to thoughtful transgressions — what Freire might call a “dehumanization” — leaving students grasping for simple answers to, or baffled by, the complex questions that undergird humanities research. I respond with teaching that is idealistic: by which I mean not only that my classes valorize those humanistic pursuits and inquiries that are irreducible to their practical use value (and that are thus invaluable), nor only that I am optimistic and trusting in my expectations of students, but also that my pedagogy is driven by a sense of ethical duty and social responsibility. I believe, with Friere, that an empowering humanities classroom does important activist work, not as a vehicle for one ideology or another, but as a “humanization,” which generates “a radical demand for the objective transformation of reality” according to the students’ own values, values that I trust, as Freire does, to change things for the better. I believe that intensive training in close reading, adapted particularly for texts composed in relation to realtime events (i.e. performances), helps students master and reclaim the apparatus by which real phenomena, past and present, are woven into perceived realities around them. Students enter my classes presuming that medieval plays were boring and pious, that drama is a rarefied, elite medium, that linguistic change is a matter of objective scientific fact, and that public cultures of the past were more repressive than present ones; they leave not only with those presumptions reversed, but also with a defamiliarized, uneasy awareness of the operations that led to those presumptions.

From there, I weave a pared-down, rough-hewn, respectful writing pedagogy into all my syllabi, graduate and undergraduate. My assignments are open-ended, offering students the full run of course readings as subjects, from among which they must choose, according to their own informed judgment, the “small but significant element” about which they can form the most compelling argument. I offer few specific instructions, prompt questions, or restrictions beyond that. With no quotas for works cited, I require only that students adjust their secondary research according to the necessities they perceive in their arguments, which they must craft in a way that “deepens, disagrees with, or deconstructs” what has been said before. These assignments require attentive, individualized mentorship from me and my TAs: we help each student cultivate a sustained, self-directed inquiry throughout the term. In discussion, I will often call on a student as a “resident specialist” in their chosen subject. Those specialists tend to develop an impressive mastery of their material. My graduate courses always end with “mock-conference” presentations of seminar papers, in which I evaluate students both on their writing and on the feedback they give to their peers. Meanwhile, I often require my undergraduates the option to present their essays to me out loud in person, one-on-one, and then to receive feedback in a live, friendly conversation, rather than in after-the-fact marginal comments — an exercise that has proven especially successful.

At first, students are intimidated by the responsibilities that I give them, but only because of habit. Broken from those habits, they reveal themselves to be ready, if not impatient, to be taken seriously as scholars, and to challenge prior scholarship. I encourage that shift through a heavy emphasis on engaged discussion in my courses, enforced by syllabi that demand presence and active participation in class, to create what Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens have called “brave space” (rather than safe space). For students who feel unable to speak up, I offer optional extra mentorship. We proceed through an informal program of flexible challenges (“come to class with questions written out; I’ll read them, then and refer to your contributions during discussion”; “raise your hand once, at a time we both plan in advance”), while I encourage them to ask how and why their voices have been silenced, rather than accepting their reticence as an inborn trait. Students who ask to participate in that program — disproportionately women, students with disabilities, and students of colour — improve significantly in discussion, without exception. I believe it is the duty of educators to empower suppressed voices to speak out; I also believe that mutual exposure to cultural diversity is essential to class discussion, especially when religious drama is the subject.

Our discussions are always lively. Elaine Showalter’s warning against a “performative” style of teaching, because professors can “run the risk of monopolizing the spotlight,” seems to me to have a very limited understanding of what performance can achieve as an art form. The plays I teach reject — or precede — the use of spotlights, and the establishment of all theatrical conventions crafted to entertain passive audiences sitting in darkness. I gravitate to what Jerzy Grotowski calls “theatre as transgression”; I prefer class environments, in turn, that create unruly, untidy, and genuinely friendly co-illuminations among a gathered fellowship, as medieval plays did. That model also aligns well with Freire’s arguments against the sedentary “banking concept of education” (“the teacher... makes deposits which the students patiently receive”). When my classes draw on my practical training in drama, they ask students to leave their seats behind: to move around the room to better understand early mises-en-scène, to interview community members and gather data on spoken English varieties, to attend live performance events, or to interact with professional actors I bring into class. My own experience as an actor only helps me enter the classroom as myself, present, vulnerable, and honest: I interrupt myself, stumble, misspeak, use profanities as much as I would in everyday speech, and express my investment in course material with unapologetic zeal. Such a performance gives the emerging thinkers, writers, and transgressors in my classes license to be equally unpolished in their expression.

In turn, my classes offer no fun hacks, skits, gamifications, pop-culture recontextualizations, or icebreakers; I get to know students only through their contributions in writing and discussion (I usually learn everyone’s name by the fourth week that way, and remember them long afterward). I respect my students’ time, assigning readings according to hours rather than pages, not as leniency but out of respect for everyone’s overcommitted schedules. I am outspoken in my refusal to create pseudo-litigious “contracts” against plagiarism, which do such cultural damage to professor-student trust and mutual adult respect, necessities for humanistic study, that their limited prevention of misconduct is hardly worthwhile. And if students ask for disability accommodations (as long as these do not make unfair demands on my time), I take their word for it and grant them, with no explanation or proof necessary — and ask them to think critically about the institutionalized distrust behind standard disability documentation.

“[T]rusting the people” whom you teach, as Freire puts it, “is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change. A real humanist can be identified more by his trust in the people than by a thousand actions in their favor without their trust.”

My teaching is transparent and unpatronizing in its empowerment of informed transgression. In my handouts on grammar and on critical thinking alike, I offer a challenge: “Don’t follow a rule, even the smallest one, unless you know why you’re following it. Don’t break a rule, even the smallest one, until you have actively sought answers about why it’s there.” Indeed, I often share the material from this statement of teaching philosophy with students (and expand upon it in an online “FAQ” to which I provide them frequent links).