The Art of the Seminar
In a well-conducted seminar, convergent
voices can result in a melodic forum
By Jay Parini
Anyone who has been privileged to sit through first-rate seminars understands their value. The seminar is that midpoint between the lecture and the individual tutorial, a place in the curriculum where students get to know the professor in a personal way, and to test their knowledge of a discipline against his or hers. Seminars can be exacting, exhilarating experiences for both the teacher and student, although conducting them is difficult work; it requires of the professor a number of skills that can only be acquired through practice and self-discipline.
I had one or two seminars in graduate school that prepared me for thinking about the form, and I often talked with my fellow students about what worked and what didn't. It so happened that three of my teachers had studied at Oxford with the legendary classicist, Eduard Fraenkel, a Berliner of Jewish heritage. In 1934, Fraenkel fled from the Nazis, settling into a chair in classical literature at Corpus Christi College, where he became a legend, attracting the best young classicists of the era to his seminars.
"I was terrified in those seminars," Iris Murdoch (the novelist and philosopher, who studied with Fraenkel in the late thirties) once said to me. "Fraenkel did not suffer fools gladly." She described his severity—nearly 50 years after the fact—with awe and fascination. Fraenkel had written landmark studies of Plautus and Horace, and he was justly famous for an edition of the Agamemnon by Aeschylus that became the standard by which all future editions of classical texts (and commentaries) would be judged. His own commentary was extraordinarily rich and astute, referring to centuries of scholarship with apparent ease, making endless little (but illuminating) judgments along the way: the sort of thing that anyone conducting the Platonic ideal of a seminar might do.
Indeed, Fraenkel reflected on the influence of his Oxford seminars on his later scholarship in his edition of that play: "My favorite reader, whose kindly and patient face would sometimes comfort me during the endless hours of drudgery, looked surprisingly like some of the students who worked with me for many years at Oxford in our happy seminar classes on the Agamemnon. Without the inspiring, and often correcting, cooperation of those young men and women, I should not have been able to complete the commentary. If they thought a passage to be particularly difficult, that was sufficient reason for me to examine and discuss it as fully as I could; and more than once it was their careful preparation, their inquisitiveness, and their persistent efforts that made it possible to reach what seemed to us like a satisfactory solution." Fraenkel added: "Anyone who has conducted seminar classes knows that the common sense of the young often shatters the subtle devices of their elders and that only bad teaching can deter them from speaking their mind."
I have learned, over three decades of teaching at Dartmouth and Middlebury, to listen more attentively when students speak, and to take what they say—even the "foolish" things—seriously. (The best teachers can pan gold in unlikely waters.) Paying attention does not mean simply turning your eyes in the student's direction, focusing somewhere above the bridge of the nose. It means gauging the attitude of students toward the material, trying to figure out how as well as what they think about a particular topic. It means refusing to respond too quickly, or perfunctorily, just to keep the conversation flowing.
It seems useful to recall that one "conducts" a seminar. The analogy with a musical conductor is appropriate and instructive. The subject of the seminar forms a kind of score; the students will already have, with greater or lesser degrees of success, mastered the score before coming to class. The expectation is, in fact, that they will have prepared for class by reading the material, by thinking up something to say. The work of the conductor is to draw out this intellectual music, to arrange it, set the tempo of play. Imagine an orchestra, if you will, without a conductor. There would be no pace, no emphasis, no interpretation—just meandering discussion.
One learns how to pace a seminar. It is always useful to have one or two vivid questions in mind for the class to "answer" in each session, and students should be given these in advance. I often end a class by saying: "Next time, we'll be thinking about X. Why is it that this or that is so? How can we be sure?" Students should have specific assignments, and certain ones should be responsible on a given day for responding to a text or question. This is the basic architecture of the seminar—the essential score, if you will. The work of the seminar leader is "conducting" the class through the allotted time, drawing all students into discussion, cutting off digressions when they seem unrelated to the main line of argument, questioning students when they say things that are either unclear or perhaps unfounded.
Students come alive in a seminar when they find themselves talking and making judgments that their peers, and their professor, find sensible and interesting. It's always possible for a seminar leader to discover a student's level of understanding and to lead them forward as they begin to make new connections, begin to "find" themselves as a thoughtful person who can express and question ideas that are raised, by the professor or by other students around the table. Half the work of any seminar—from the professor's viewpoint—is getting students involved in a serious way.
There is, of course, no substitute for preparation, as everyone who has led a seminar must know. Teachers must have a deep and passionate knowledge of the material and be aware of the relevant scholarship and competing approaches to the subject. They must be willing to make this complex knowledge available to students and to model critical thinking. Students should come away from a seminar understanding that the professor has been genuinely moved by the material, and that certain standards—certain values—are involved in making judgments. In a very real sense, the seminar is a place where the community of scholars comes most vividly into being; as such it remains a sacred
and indispensable place, for students and teachers
alike.
Jay Parini is the D. E. Axinn Professor of English and Creative Writing at Middlebury. This essay was published in theChronicle of Higher Educationand will be included in Parini's forthcoming book,The Art of Teaching.