Reading for Teaching: Learning How to Slow Down with The Slow Professor

By Scott McLaren

“The Slow Professor is an attractively short book,” writes Stephan Collini in the book’s Forward, “but whatever you do, don’t read it too quickly. And don’t just read it: give it to friends, talk about it with people, try to do what it suggests. In your own time…” (xiii). On the last Friday of a long and unseasonably cold November, a group of professors, educational developers, postdocs, graduate students, and librarians gathered in a quiet corner of the Scott Library to follow Collini’s advice. We did not just read the book. We talked about it. And we tried to imagine what it would actually look like to begin slowing down.

As we gazed around the room and began to tentatively share our insights with one another, we discovered one very important truth about what Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber promise in page after page of their book: we are indeed not alone. Our small gathering served as a powerful reminder that everyone in our group – indeed, everyone in the academy – has quietly struggled with the fact that academic work, by its very nature, is never done; that we have all felt guilty about not working hard enough; and that as professionals called upon to demonstrate intellectual mastery time and again, the open admission of any kind of struggle carries with it a subtle threat to our identities as academics. Though there is no easy remedy for such struggles, The Slow Professor urges us to recognize that contemplation is indeed a legitimate activity for an academic. It argues that we are often too focused on our projects, presentations, papers, and books. And it suggests that slowing down can be a powerful act of resistance that in turn will galvanize us and open fresh perspectives on our work.

But what does any of this have to do with the classroom? Berg and Seeber devote an entire chapter to teaching under the beguiling title “Pedagogy and Pleasure.” Their central argument is that “pleasure – experienced by the instructor and the students – is the most important predictor of ‘learning outcomes’” (34). Having fun in the classroom, they argue, makes us better teachers. And it makes our students better learners. And yet we struggle to embrace this kind of teaching. Instead, we are more likely to punish ourselves with overwork. With that in mind we spent some time reflecting on what is undoubtedly the book’s most jarring and powerful quotation taken from Mary Rose O’Reilley’s The Peaceable Classroom. A classroom devoid of pleasure, she writes, “doesn’t help students … learn, it ruins our health and causes us to have colourful breakdowns – but the most important reason [it is to be avoided] is that it ultimately makes us hate students” (40). Hate students? The mind reels. And yet, how many of us can relate?

Fortunately, Berg and Seeber offer some very practical advice about how we can learn to truly enjoy what we do in the classroom. Much of that advice boils down to finding ways to limit the pressure we put on ourselves to perform. We need to accept, for example, that nervousness is a perfectly acceptable emotion to experience when entering the classroom. We don’t have to know everything. In fact, encyclopedic knowledge can intimidate and distance our students. We also have to find the courage to pause and to occupy our space with silence and stillness – as actors do. Humour in the classroom is also not merely matter of telling a few jokes. Sustaining a class in good humour is much easier if we simply take ourselves less seriously. Our group was particularly fascinated by the idea that we can also imbed narrative into our teaching – that we can not only tell stories in a course, but that we can even tell the course as a story (48).

Though the authors focused primarily on how professors can be slow their own practice, our conversation veered back repeatedly to how we might help our students slow down as well. So many of the practices we routinely engage in with little reflection in fact have the potential to rush our students through material. Assigning large amounts of reading to students, for example, assumes that students all read at a certain pace – and, even worse, that they ought to read at a certain pace. Yet we have somehow come to believe that imposing aggressive reading schedules on students is the very definition of rigour. If we instead took the time to know our students better, wouldn’t we have a better appreciation of their actual capacities? Robin Sutherland-Harris of the Teaching Commons shared with us a recent experience she had holding un-office hours for students enrolled in a large class. Robin would make herself available to students in public yet casual settings to discuss subjects entirely outside the scope of the course. Most students, of course, did not take advantage of this opportunity. But those who did experienced a learning environment that was much enriched by the fact that their professor came to know them as individuals.

None of this is to suggest that there aren’t considerable structural barriers in the way of both students and professors who wish to slow down in the classroom. Professors in the Teaching Stream have by definition less time built into their schedules for this kind of experimentation. Those without tenure must be careful of every minute not spent writing. Ever larger classes complicate and undermine efforts to slow things down and get to know students individually. And sometimes students simply expect to be served what they need to know in tidy slides and recorded lectures. But what became clear to everyone around the room as we continued to share was the fact that these obstacles invariably seem more intimidating when faced in isolation from one another. Merely by coming together as a group to discuss the possibility of slowing down was a kind of first step down that path. Taking time to read and reflect on The Slow Professorforced our hand. And by poring over that text in company we came away feeling heartened. Somehow, in that moment, we felt more courageous about taking risks in the classroom. We felt more willing to give our students the space and time we know they need to think. And, ultimately, we felt more hopeful about rejecting at least some of the multiplying demands and artificial (and often self-imposed) deadlines that invariably diminish us as teachers.

This conversation was the first in the new Reading for Teaching program, co-facilitated by the Teaching Commons and York Libraries. Are you interested in reading for teaching with us? Email Lisa Endersby, Educational Developer (lendersb@yorku.ca) or Scott McLaren, Teaching and Learning Librarian (scottm@yorku.ca) to learn more. Additional information is also available on the Teaching Commons website at https://teachingcommons.yorku.ca/reading-for-teaching-2/

About the Author 

Scott McLaren is a Teaching and Learning Librarian in the Scott Library and a member of the graduate faculty in Humanities and History. His most recent publication is Pulpit, Press, and Politics: Methodists and the Market for Books in Upper Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2019).