Interviewing: A Teaching Technique I've Looked at from Both Sides Now

Abstract

We gather ideas for teaching from journals and books, from our colleagues, and from methods courses. Some ideas are successful in classes; some aren't. But I've often wondered, after learning a new teaching technique, how it works from the students' point of view. Recently I had the opportunity to find out. Last year, I played two roles, student and teacher. While on leave from my school district, I took graduate courses as well as teaching college freshman English, and the experience turned out to be valuable in unexpected way-as a student I learned something about teaching. The occasion which led to that discovery began inauspiciously. A research paper was assigned in my Southwest Literature course. It was fair, I decided, that I be subjected to the same torture I had imposed on my students, but by the time I finished the project, I was enthusiastic about what I had done, and possibilities for making research, and other writing tasks, less tedious for my students became apparent. The assignment was to research the author or another aspect of a book from Western American literature, but the unusual thing was that the instructor allowed us to go directly to the sources for information, as anthropologists do, rather than dig exclusively in the library. The research would consist of a series of interviews with living human beings, which sounded more intriguing than verifying work already written on the topic. Still, though I live in Arizona, I was not acquainted with Western writers, but I soon discovered how easy it is to make contacts. The first person I spoke to, the Indian art liaison from my district, had a book written by a Native American woman, now deceased, whose grandson worked at the state epartment of education. I read the book and made an appointment with the grandson, who directed me to another of the author's relatives, who directed me to another, and so on. I enjoyed the interviews with the author's family and tribe, especially the unforgettable afternoon I spent with the eighty-nine year old widower of the writer, a man of remarkable memory, who related stories of the days when Phoenix was a one horse town of dirt roads. His description of leaving the Pima Indian reservation, traveling across the ocean, and landing in La Havre, France, during World War I gave new dimensions to the cliche, culture shock. One of the stories I was told is