Professor Julienne Empric Recognized as Outstanding Teacher by Modern Language Association

Julienne H. Empric, professor of literature, was honored as the Outstanding Teacher for 2005 in the 4-year, liberal arts college category by the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA), at their annual convention. SAMLA is a regional branch of the Modern Language Association, the premier professional organization for academic professionals in the field of Literatures and Languages.

Prof. Julienne Empric, is the recipient of the spring 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award, granted by Eckerd College Organization of Students; the recipient of The Robert A. Staub Outstanding Teacher Award and The John M. Bevan Teaching Excellence and Campus Leadership Award; and was selected as a National Finalist in the Professor of the Year Competition sponsored by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) in 1983. With Eckerd College alumna Susan Russ Walker (Federal magistrate Judge, Middle District of Alabama), Prof. Empric offers seminars on Law and Literature for Federal Magistrate Judges' Workshops nationwide.

In her presentation, My View of Teaching, given at the SAMLA Convention, Prof. Empric was asked to explain her philosophy or basic principles of effective teaching, how her teaching may have changed or evolved during her career in the classroom, and to offer her observations about what is required to succeed in the English classroom circa 2005:

The primary task of the teacher...is to instigate and nurture that first and most important virtual world, the world of the non-present: the memory and the imagination, the world of the possible with its chance to know, to engage, and to mitigate the world of the real. Between the idea and the act falls the teacher.

As teachers, we are architects, engineers and contractors on symbolic construction sites of immense importance. Without systems of language, we would be unable to engage in the miracle of communication with our students - or anyone else. Without a teacher’s interpretive reading voice, a child will not develop the internal monologue necessary to order and to understand the world. Without metaphor and story - both quintessentially the presence of absent images and worlds - learning would come to a halt.

If I were to suggest two specific areas which we, as teachers of literature and language, should address today and as we move further into the 21st century, they would be: First, the need to teach students to feel; and second, the need to challenge them to strive for genuine depth in their learning. These needs are related, in that each is a consequence of our current culture.

We live in a world that, since Sputnik in the 1950s has neglected teaching students how to feel in the pursuit of teaching them how to think. I don’t mean to create an artificial dichotomy here between thinking and feeling, so much as to suggest that in learning about any art - perhaps especially literature - and in learning those important lessons which change lives, thinking and feeling are so closely enmeshed as to work through and with each other in their discovery of truth. Our students should be able to recognize and appreciate the difference between art and entertainment, between a book or film or an idea or argument which genuinely moves the emotions and one which manipulates them.

We should also persuade students to the importance of working toward thoughtful depth in their learning - something very difficult amidst the constant cultural barrage that more is better (more information, more courses, more majors and minors, more amenities, and therefore more part-time jobs). Speed and noise need occasionally to give way to taking time in relative quiet for thoughtful reflection to be able to move to depth.

The full text of this talk will be published by the South Atlantic Association of Departments of English in their Winter Newsletter.