ES: What sort of training did you get as a teacher?

DF: Actually, I was trained by the person who ended up becoming my wife, Emily Allen, so I think I can say that the experience was properly transformative. She was a fellow graduate student at the time who, along with two other students, set up an orientation for new incoming T.A.s at the U of California, Santa Barbara. Outside of that properly mind-opening start, though, my training consisted of being thrown to the wolves, which is, unfortunately, the experience of many T.A.s at various graduate schools. Personally, though, I had the advantage of marrying the person who is the best teacher I've ever seen in action (someone who also then became my colleague at Purdue U, West Lafayette), which means I've had someone with whom to discuss teaching methods since I began, really. Our experience of sharing our stories about teaching with each other subsequently made us especially comfortable with opening our classes to others at Purdue, where we have a community of truly remarkable teachers, a community that I try to get involved in my classes-and in whose classes I participate-whenever I can. As you suggest in your book, teaching can be a truly anxiety-producing experience so it can make all the difference to have that sort of support and community. Since Emily and I are both nineteenth-century scholars, we can also really speak to the specific pedagogical trials and tribulations we each experience in our classes.

ES: Who do you consider the best teacher you've ever had, and what made that teacher great?

DF: I suppose my favorite teacher (beyond Emily) was Robert Gellately, a professor at Huron College in Canada (now the Strassler Family Chair for the Study of Holocaust History at Clark U), who teaches the history of Nazi Germany. What was great about the full-year class I took with him at Huron College-a course on revolutions-was that it also functioned to make the students experience a revolution of sorts in the way they thought about the world around them: the contingency of laws, the violence at the foundation of social systems, the relation between the power of the individual and the power of the state, et cetera. And yet, my perception at the time was that Prof. Gellately hardly ever spoke; he managed somehow (through perfectly posed questions and the re-orientation or re-statement of awkward student comments) to make us reach the conclusions he thought were particularly important regarding the very difficult works we read (Michel Foucault, Hayden White, Arno Mayer, Hans Mommsen, etc.). When I entered graduate school, my best teachers at UCSB managed to do the same (Garrett Stewart, Alan Liu, Julie Carlson) but what has stuck with me was how incredible it was that a professor could accomplish that high level of discussion in the undergraduate classroom. My goal in my classes ever since has been to reproduce that same level of student-centered discussion.

ES: One thing I find interesting about your teaching method is your use of discussion synopses, which you make available on the web. Can you say something about that?

DF: Well, one problem with student-centered discussion is that it can sometimes be disjointed. Students will go off on tangents and sometimes even de-rail discussion altogether, which you have to expect, of course, and find ways to counterbalance. The synopses allow me to provide a higher degree of-admittedly retroactive-structure to those discussions. I also try to cite the students by name, which proves to them that I really value what they say. They tend to respond, in turn, by being more excited about pushing themselves in classroom discussion. My goal is also to open the boundaries of the classroom, to resist the notion of the classroom as hermetically sealed.

ES: Can you say more about that? How can one go about doing that, and why should teachers be interested in breaking those boundaries?

DF: I believe that the main reason I do what I do is to provide my students with the tools to ensure their own freedom. That may sound overly grand, but it's a lesson that is brought home to me whenever I teach the Holocaust, a lesson that perhaps I first learned in Robert Gellately's class. Our goal as teachers of the humanities is to provide students with the ability to argue their own minds, to be heard. Without that ability, any human is open to losing his/her power before others. I try to illustrate this point through the trial format. In my class on the Holocaust, for example, I have my students put Adolf Eichmann on trial (again): the class splits into prosecution and defense councils; each side prepares its case over a few classes; and we then conduct the trial, usually with a guest professor as judge.

Through this exercise, students learn the importance of a strong, well-structured and well-executed argument; they also learn to appreciate the ethical, juridical, and moral aspects of critical thinking (and, by extension, of a university education), for they cannot help but acknowledge in the process of defending or prosecuting Eichmann the hidden ethical stakes behind the construction of strong, well-supported argumentation. As I seek to illustrate in not only my teaching of the Holocaust but also my teaching of English classes generally, there is, then, an inherent ethical dimension to all pedagogy oriented toward the teaching of writing and argumentation. It is this ethical dimension that speaks most strongly in support of protecting the writing-intensive classroom, which is threatened by the desire of many universities to adopt business principles to extend education to larger numbers at lesser costs. It is also this dimension that speaks to the students' responsibilities before others, that alerts them to the effects of their learning beyond the classroom.

It is because of this ethical side of pedagogy that I encourage my students to open the classroom to the world outside. The last class on the Holocaust that I taught at Purdue was one that allowed me-more than any other-to pursue this idea of an open classroom, thanks to a generous grant for the class from the Lilly Retention Initiative at Purdue (a grant that is designed to improve the pedagogical experience of the best incoming freshmen at my university by creating more intimate, experimental classes for those students). That grant allowed me, among other things, to set up a field trip to Chicago (where the class visited two Holocaust memorials); to invite visiting speakers (including Robert Gellately himself, actually); to stage a public production of Bertolt Brecht's Private Life of the Master Race on a campus stage; and, finally, to create an interactive, public memorial at the end of class. In that last exercise, the students came up with their own memorial design, tying black ribbons to the trees in Academy Park on campus, coupled with an invitation to the Purdue community to remove the ribbons as an act of remembrance forpast injustices and as a commitment to fight injustice in the future. What opened the eyes of my students is how readily the university community responded to each of the public events they were involved with.

A great class gets students to see the rest of world outside the classroom in new, exciting, transformative ways. The internet provides yet one more opening out to the world, a way for students to believe that learning does not only occur during the 50 minutes of a class period.

ES: Is the teaching of nineteenth-century literature not very different, however, from the teaching of the Holocaust?

DF: On the one hand, yes, of course; on the other hand, the ability to analyze, to argue, and to discuss with others is the same regardless of topic. I even import the trial format when I teach Milton's Paradise Lost in a class on the epic that I often offer at Purdue-except that Milton's God and Satan end up being the two characters on the witness stand, with God and Satan usually played by the Miltonists and Romanticists in the department. The exercise allows students to think about how ideologies change over time and how literature can continue to speak to radically different cultural purviews (e.g. the "perverse" re-interpretation of Satan by the Romantic poets). The teaching of theory also allows me to address "revolutionary" ideas even as I'm simultaneously bringing students up to speed on, say, scansion or l'explication de texte. Whenever I teach, I consider it my duty to prove to students that what they're learning has relevance to their lives outside the classroom. That's the case whether I'm teaching Night and Fog or The Ring and the Book, whether I'm teaching postmodernism or poetics.