Making It (New) as a Graduate Teaching Assistant Sarah Copland (bio) Is innovation the purview of younger generations of instructors? Is there a point in one’s teaching career at which innovation is an easier undertaking, a natural move to make, or a necessity for survival? If, as Marsha Bryant argues, our changing understanding of modernism has bequeathed us the responsibility to update our pedagogical approaches in lectures and assignments, finding new modes by which we might engage our students with the richness and complexity of modernist cultural production, surely this responsibility is applicable to all teachers, regardless of their experience or seniority. Yet for reasons connected more with our profession’s idiosyncrasies than with changes in our conceptualizations of modernism, nowhere is the imperative for pedagogical innovation more keenly felt than among the ranks of junior teachers, especially those on the job market or approaching tenure review. Their professional advancement depends in part on their teaching evaluations, which in turn depend on their ability to “make it new,” to titillate the jaded palates of the modern student-consumer in new ways. But for the most junior of these junior teachers, the graduate teaching assistant, whom Richard Cassidy describes as the “student who will someday be a teacher,”1 innovation-dependent professional advancement is one concern among many in the jungle of a first-time classroom. For graduate teaching assistants, the pressure to develop new ways of teaching a newly reconceived field of study is merely one facet of the greater exhilaration and agony of fashioning our own pedagogical identities and styles. For us, “making it new” is often a matter of “making it,” period. [End Page 485] Consequently, when Helen Sword invited me to participate in the MSA’s 2007 Open Forum on Teaching and asked me to reflect on a teaching moment in which I had “made it new,” I felt my task was both straightforward and impossible. And yet I realized that teaching moments could classify as pedagogically innovative even if they arose not from a conscious effort to try something new in the classroom, but from my improvisational survival instincts as someone whose pedagogical style is in its infancy and who has the added generational advantage of having generally only encountered “new” ideas about modernism. One such moment occurred during a class on Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) during the 2006–2007 academic year, when I was leading weekly seminars for a course on modernist fiction at the University of Toronto, under the supervision of course instructor Melba Cuddy-Keane.2 My prepared notes read: “The novel enacts the same kind of passing that it thematizes: ostensibly about racial passing, it passes off a sexuality theme as a race theme because it was easier to discuss race than black female sexuality in an era dominated, as Deborah E. McDowell argues, by ‘the myth of the black woman’s sexual licentiousness. . . . Larsen could only hint at the idea of black women as sexual subjects behind the safe and protective covers of traditional narrative subjects and conventions.’”3 I was just about to make these remarks when one of my students interjected, “I’ve got it! This novel is about two black women pretending to be white and they’re also homosexual, pretending to be straight—two kinds of passing!” His contribution made me uncomfortable, firstly because he was simplifying the text’s complex engagement with passing, implying that it is a movement between authentic and inauthentic identities, and secondly because his reading showed me that my own remarks about the novel re-inscribed the same reductive thinking. I needed to find a way of inviting the students to “apply a little terminological pressure,” to use Alan Golding’s words, or a little cognitive pressure, to the concept of passing—to think about the relation of passing to what Thadious M. Davis describes as the novel’s “discourses of hybridity, biraciality, simultaneity, multiple subjectivities, and plurality.”4 Given that we had only just finished seminars on Mrs. Dalloway, an obvious candidate for an inter-textual comparison along these lines, the strategy I deployed instinctively might seem a strange choice. Yet on reflection I see that my instinctive pedagogical...