Vol. 7 No. 11 (November 1997) pp. 523-525.

CULTIVATING INTELLIGENCE: POWER, LAW, AND THE POLITICS OF TEACHING: A COLLABORATION by Louise Harmon and Deborah W. Post. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 230 pp. Paper $15.95. ISBN 0-8147-6629-3.

Reviewed by Philippa Strum, Department of Political Science, Brooklyn College; Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Why was there no test of teaching skills before we got our jobs in academia? Why are we told that we are supposed to be dedicated, available, enthusiastic teachers when our vitae become the only relevant answer on the tenure and promotion "exams"? How do we teach students who don't want to do the reading?

Harmon and Post's CULTIVATING INTELLIGENCE was written by two law professors at the Jacob D. Fuchsberg School of Law, Touro College, but addresses the teaching concerns of academics in all fields. It is in itself a model of conveying information painlessly and of teaching through narative.

Louise Harmon, a white mother from the genteel South, received her LL.M. from Harvard. Deborah W. Post, a black mother from Virginia, earned her LL.B. there. Along with teaching, mothering and so on, Louise (as she is called in the book) is studying for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia. Deborah did post-graduate work in anthropology at Columbia, working for Margaret Mead, and also practiced law before becoming an academic. And they both have gardens.

Gardening, in fact, is the metaphor they use in this examination of cognitive theory as applied to teaching. Drawing upon the metaphor of a "gardening project" conducted over all four seasons of a year, they begin with two short prologues, one written by each. They then go on to trade recollections of and reflections upon their joint attempt to acquire a theoretical basis for their own teaching and to interest their law school colleagues in doing the same, all divided into four "seasons" and framed as essays addressed to each other.

Louise, for example, puts her "Confessions of a First Year Law Teacher" into the opening section, "Spring," pondering such matters as what she was supposed to do as a teacher and why she was given a teaching job in the absence of any test of her skills. Discussing her attempt to establish her authority in the classroom, she muses that the "presumption of confidence" made by the students and other faculty members works only for men: women faculty members are constantly on trial. All the more so for black women faculty members, Deborah comments. Louise had promised the Gonzaga University School of Law's Institute for Law School Teaching a manuscript applying cognitive theory to the teaching of law. She managed to get part of her faculty to go on a two-day retreat for this purpose. Now, looking back, Louise tells Deborah they've failed in their project; the seeds have not germinated. Deborah replies that just as there is more than one planting season in a year, they, who have planted seeds, have time and unexamined possibilities ahead.

"Gardening" evokes an unending process, as well as change, stability, conceptualization, and the idea of planting seeds now for what may be a very much in-the-future harvest. This is a well-chosen metaphor for teaching - which is indeed all about planting seeds of knowledge and method and then waiting/hoping for some future result, as well as trial and error. The two women have an impressive sense of teaching as process rather than end.

Deborah discusses the angst of black women law teachers. The students are uninterested in the ideas about race, gender and class that she finds in the "rhetoric of decision" and in legal thought. She wants to use conversation as a teaching method, but the students don't like it. Her idea of teaching is about asking questions and having the students ruminate about the nature of justice; theirs is about being told the answers. It is not a satisfying match.

Moving into summer, Louise recounts the days of the retreat and postulates that teaching is "the transmission of desire." She summarizes a good many theories of cognitive development, dwelling particularly upon that of William G. Perry, who saw each student operating out of "an interpretive framework" through which s/he gives meaning to a learning experience. This, like gardening, is a dynamic rather than a static framework. Louise draws on Perry throughout the book, referring to the different stages through which a learner should progress: that of receiving knowledge, with the student's assumption that absorption = high grades; relativism, or the recognition of the legitimacy of diverse opinions and values; acceptance of the notion of a "better" answer and of the teacher as a guide for a new way of thinking rather than an imparter of absolute knowledge; and, finally, commitment, or the student's making of value-based choices. Why, Louise wonders, aren't professors required to articulate the way in which students are supposed to acquire knowledge, and the way in which that knowledge will be related to an exam? Later on she expresses dismay upon learning that a fellow faculty member doesn't bother to write model answers for the exams he gives. How, she asks, can he expect his students to do what he doesn't, and how does he make certain that his grading is consistent?

When Fall arrives, Louise is appalled at the incredible amount of time she spends in attempts at creative teaching, including grading the thoughtful papers she has managed to elicit. What she really wants to do, she laments, is write. But that raises questions: "How have I come to place such a high value on my writing? What exactly is my job supposed to be?" And she adds,

Of one thing I am certain: it was not my idea. As the years went by, the Promotion and Tenure Committee kept sending me memoranda expressing concern about the snail-like progress of my scholarship. The message was loud and clear: Yes, yes, you seem to be a good teacher, but where are those law review articles? Another thought occurs to her in Winter, when she turns the assumption that teaching is a public activity on its head. Arguing that the classroom is public for students but private for professors, she explains, "The privacy for the teacher stems from the freedom to choose the form and substance of the class, and also from the lack of peer scrutiny and control. The lack of privacy for the students stems from the loss of control, and from the intense scrutiny of one's peers and one's superior." That leads her to reflect upon our "private" and our "public" (teaching) faces. She peers through Venetian blinds at her colleagues leaving their cars in the faculty parking lot and writes,
I am convinced that something happens to them in the parking lot, a metamorphosis, a mysterious and invisible process...I watch them at their cars...dropping books on the asphalt, locking doors, pulling at wrinkled pants, smoothing rebellious hair."
Then the transformation: when those colleagues enter the law school building,
"Lo and behold: they have new faces...Their books no longer tumble, and something has happened to their parking lot wrinkles, those wrinkles in their pants and on their worried faces. They are gone."

"They must be getting those faces from somewhere...Perhaps there is a hidden vending machine, dispensing new faces to law teachers as they round the corner and enter the building...How can they teach with those other faces on?"

Changing the metaphor to "a coat checking stand in a fancy restaurant", she wonders about the parking lot faces they no longer wear: "Is there some metaphysical bailee who takes possession of their vulnerability?" The retreat, in her view, had failed; her colleagues' teaching did not change. She concludes that the answer lies in that change of faces: "Learning how to become a better teacher requires a parking lot face."

Both women write beautifully. As Deborah tells Louise, "You think in metaphors...you want to decorate the structure of our collaboration, to make it so beautiful and so enticing that people will enter and look around, unaware of the way the structure directs their attention, moves them along a pathway they don't see." They succeed in that, exploring cognitive theory while calling upon everything from law review articles to Zora Neale Hurston and James Joyce to help explain their ideas. For the sake of the pedagogy classes no one suggested we take, our skills as teachers, our students' well-being, and a lesson in how to convey information, this is a book well worth reading.