If our standards for expertise remain as high as they have been for the past generation or so, instructors will be so tightly ensconced in the areas of their expertise that it will become even rarer to see a syllabus that gives something of the world tour that literature is supposed to be so good at.

If we buy into the theory that a collegiate lit course should teach its students to love reading, that argument alone makes me think that instructors like me should be given at least a semester’s training in how to teach texts whose contexts we will never fully know.

So I’m thinking about this tension: on one hand, reading/studying difference is good. On the other, it is dangerous and damaging. I’m going to focus more on teaching than scholarship here (research can be something different and can be part of pedagogy).

What I’m really finding interesting, though, is that in the situations you describe, there seems to be the assumption that the professor must be an expert or specialist in all aspects of the curriculum. This is a fairly top-down model of pedagogy. Granted, I’m from happy comp/rhet-land, but I don’t have a problem with constructing a classroom environment in which the class collectively learns about a text and its cultural-historical contexts. This can be a very rich learning environment that has the added benefit of helping students own their knowledge and learn how to learn both individually and as a group. I think its ok to say let’s learn about “x” together.