The Johnston Center for Integrative Studies

This essay is a first-person account of pedagogical and scholarly insights gained by a senior faculty member who, along with two other faculty colleagues, took on the role of students in a Coetzee seminar.  The shift in perspective yielded important insights for my own teaching, for my understandings of professorial “authority” and feminist reading, and reinforced my convictions about the importance of a collaborative classroom.  At the end of the term I was privileged to hear, then read, a good deal of my fellow students’ writing, and have woven that into my reflections. All this led to fresh ideas for my courses in the history of the American West: Themes relative to the pastoral, fathers and daughters, and professorial authority, and a still-developing comparison with another, equally provocative professor-protagonist, Lyman Ward of Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. 

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