W ith polyglot quotations and characters lifted from an encyclopedia’s worth of mythologies, T.S. Eliot’s sprawling “The Waste Land” isn’t the most approachable of poems. But when John Zubizarreta introduces it to his students at Columbia College, he tells them to think about it as “spilling out your personal life with no boundaries — in writing, in shouting, in tattoos on your body.”
“In a different age, using a different modality, and coming at it from a very different cultural experience,” he tells them, “that’s exactly what Eliot was doing. Think of ‘The Waste Land’ as a bunch of texts.” The students understand, he says. “They’re like, ‘Ah, ah, OK.’
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold,” he continues, quoting W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” published just two years before “The Waste Land.” He tells students the chaos they see everyday in the news “is exactly what Eliot was seeing — he was texting it in the form of a poem.”
Mr. Zubizarreta, a 67-year-old professor of English, has taught at the South Carolina women’s college since 1988, and is also the director of its honors program and of faculty development. He was the Carnegie Foundation/CASE U.S. Professor of the Year for Baccalaureate Colleges in 2010-11, but he’s best known on the Columbia campus as a champion of what he refers to as “reflective learning moments” — “RLMs,” for short. He’s talked about them so much, he says with a laugh, that “they satirize me on campus. But you can’t satirize what you don’t understand.”
Meet some devoted faculty members who might spark your interest in taking risks and trying new things in class.
Brynna Gregg, a senior majoring in English, explains that RLMs are “those times when he points out the intrinsic value of thinking about thinking or writing about writing.”
“He regularly pushes us to reflect on how we learn, how learning in one class connects to learning in other classes and to our personal lives, and why our learning is important in the first place,” says Ms. Gregg. “No other professor I’ve had has pushed me to be metacognitive — to think not only about what I’m learning but how I’m learning it and how my mind is processing it.”
On a lighter note, she says Mr. Zubizarreta loves the Beatles, “so he’s always finding ways to tie them into our class discussions.” In every course of his she’s taken, he’s brought in his guitar and sung to the class at least once.
“I tell my students all the time, we’re here to build bridges in your brain,” he says. “I tell them, ‘What do all of you notice about this conversation? Sally made some comparisons between this novel and another from a different class. Why is that good scholarly process?’”
Mr. Zubizarreta is somewhat skeptical of the idea that what he does is innovative. But, he says, “we know a whole lot more just in the last 10 years from neuroscience about the ways in which the brain learns in different ways.”
“Lecture is a venerable form of teaching,” he says. “I had great lecturers in school, though I don’t lecture much myself.” Instead, he establishes an online forum for each course in which students trade ideas and reflections. He calls it “an incredibly rich pedagogical tool.”
“In class we look at what students have been writing on the forum, and that’s what we discuss. Discussion is energizing. It gives students opportunities to test their knowledge and have civil conversations, to respect what others say. You have to back up what you say, be sound with your analysis, and back up your claims. They’re teaching as much as I’m teaching.
“That’s what collaborative learning is all about. They feel empowered as learners, they do a lot of the teaching themselves.”
M r. Zubizarreta describes his own life as “a story of how much difference a teacher can make in students’ lives.” He comes from what he calls a very poor immigrant family: His parents left Cuba “right before Castro came down from the hills,” moving first to New York and then to Miami. When an 11th-grade teacher pushed him to continue his education past high school, he enrolled at what was then Miami-Dade Junior College (now Miami Dade College), working nights at Florida Power and Light to pay his bills.
Then a Miami-Dade professor, Marjorie Buhr (who died in 1992), promised to help him through his junior and senior years at Florida International University. Then, after her oldest son was killed in a motorcycle accident, she decided to help Mr. Zubizarreta through graduate school at the University of South Carolina. Degree notwithstanding, he and his new wife outfitted a “hippie” Ford van with a plywood bed and drove west, spending the next four years working at ski resorts in Colorado and mountaineering in Alaska.
They came back to South Carolina only when “we were absolutely destitute,” he recalls. That’s when his wife’s mother asked if he had ever heard of Columbia College. “I was hired on the spot,” he says. “This place changed me. It made me the teacher I’ve become.”
Ms. Gregg points out another of Mr. Zubizaerreta’s distinctions: He doesn’t give tests or quizzes. “There is always an open-ended assessment of our learning, which pushes us to think for ourselves in a very crucial way,” she says. “Our final projects are collaborative and creative and entirely open-ended, the only requirement being that we must synthesize what we learned over the semester and show it to the class. People have made videos, board games, songs, and skits.”
“He has a very high energy that automatically pulls students into the conversation,” she adds. “It gives them permission to get excited about literature.”
“I tell my students all the time, we’re here to build bridges in your brain.”
Lawrence Biemiller writes about a variety of usual and unusual higher-education topics. Reach him at lawrence.biemiller@chronicle.com.
Premium
How Eric Mazur came to realize that the traditional classroom lecture had to go.
Premium
A methods-based curriculum could empower students in college and for life.
