NetVUE’s podcast Callings has released a new episode, which features an interview with Carlo Rotella, an award-winning writer and professor of American Studies, English, and journalism at Boston College. His most recent book, What Can I Get Out of This?: Teaching and Learning in a Classroom Full of Skeptics gets at the heart of what it means to teach and to learn together with undergraduate students today. Carlo has been a regular contributor to The New York Times Magazine since 2007. His work has appeared in collections like The Best American Essays, as well as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Slate, and various scholarly periodicals. Recurring subjects in his writing are cities and city life, boxing, music, crime, basketball, neighborhoods, and how people get good at things. He is co-editor and founder of the University of Chicago Press’s Chicago Visions and Revisions book series.
As his career and his most recent book illustrates, Carlo is interested in the nuts and bolts of teaching—what he considers its craft and the ways we can build classroom experiences that help our students make meaning. The book follows the experience of a single cohort of students in a required introductory literature course, most of whom are not English majors. In it, Rotella tells the story of what happens when students practice discussing ideas and readings with each other over a semester and then follows up with them a few years later, revealing that the course’s impact yielded an impactful return on investment in one’s education and life. As he describes it, one of the things it explores is “how to be a student, how to do college,” helping educators better understand how our students experience and live out their vocations as students.
“What can I get out of this English class?” Carlo asks of his own course, channeling his students’ skepticism about the liberal arts and concerns about their future careers. Even as he engages their utilitarian impulses, he also pushes back against the direct connection between majors and jobs that they want to exist—“this idea that there’s no job called English, there’s no job called history.” For Carlo, this kind of thinking “willfully misunderstands the relationship between school and work.” Instead, he wants his students to see that “what we’re doing in here is we’re practicing extracting meaning from the world around you, which is a skill you’re going to need as a citizen, as a worker.”
Like many things worth doing, learning this skill can challenging, but it can be learned through practice; in Carlo’s classroom, meaning making becomes a craft that is difficult but doable, one that requires courage and perseverance: “You’re paying for the repeated experience of being daunted by something difficult,” he tells them, “getting together with other people, figuring out how to make something of it. And a person who does a difficult thing is a person who has done a difficult thing. And in a sense, that’s what we’re really about.”
Carlo’s own vocation as a writer reflects this interest in the communal contexts of such meaning-making. As a writer, he explains that he is interested in what drives other people to do what they do. “We go around as people,” he observes, with “an inchoate urge inside of us. Let’s say like an urge to make noise, or an urge to know things, or an urge to hit things, or be hit or whatever it is.” For these inchoate urges “to take shape and become a thing in the world,” he argues, “you have to pour it into a container. And what I’m interested in is: what do those containers look like?” Looking back on his many writing projects, he notes, “I like talking about how a particular set of historical circumstances will produce a set of containers, and how people come along and pour their impulses into that container, whatever it is, and then it takes what shape it takes.”
Overall, this episode’s conversation captures the impact of a particular classroom “container” on Carlo’s students as well as the ways our callings within and outside of education can help us practice being better at what we do. “We forget how embodied school is,” Carlo observes when asked what advice he would give to undergraduate students, “how the face-to-face classroom is a place where people are present in their bodies, and are intensely aware of the presence of other people. So I guess one of the things I would say is: be present and go do things.”
Click hereto listen to the episode featuring Carlo Rotella, “The Craft of Teaching (and Learning).”
Geoffrey W. Bateman is the editor of Vocation Matters.
