English Professor Elizabeth Renker Wins Prestigious Teaching Award
Elizabeth Renker doesn't hesitate when asked what she hopes her students—all her students, in the many different courses she has taught—learn from her classes."Paying attention," she said. "When I use the phrase 'paying attention,' I'm borrowing it from the tradition of meditation—the habit of getting yourself off autopilot and really trying to absorb whatever it is you're encountering in your experience. I don't want them memorizing stuff and spitting it back on a test. That's the opposite of 'paying attention.' Maybe a better way to phrase that is something like 'attending to your experience.'"
Professor Renker, Associate Professor of American Literature at Ohio State since 1991, encourages students to pay attention to experience by inventing original classes with topics that students get excited about. To honor her abilities, Professor Renker was recently awarded the prestigious, university-wide Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. Recipients are selected from hundreds of nominations proposed by students and colleagues. Winners receive a cash award of $3,000, as well as a base salary increase of $1,200, and are inducted into the University's Academy of Teaching. "The ten recipients emerge out of a rigorous selection process that includes looking not only at the nominations," said Susan Williams, English professor and member of this year's selection committee, "but also at SEI scores (student electronic evaluations), comments from chairs, and responses from the candidate's former students."
Professor Renker has taught an array of classes at Ohio State, including the gateway course to the English major, and graduate seminars, but some of her favorite teaching moments have occurred while teaching Special Topics at the 500-level. She designed a class that devoted the whole quarter to a close reading of Moby Dick; she designed a class that looked at issues of the canon through a single poet, Sarah Piatt. But the class that has garnered her attention from both undergraduates and the university newspaper, The Lantern, is her class, "Poetry/Alternative: A History of English Poetry and Alternative Music."
"The premise of this class is that poetry was once a popular genre and is no more, and that the cultural function poetry once played in America is now occupied by popular music," said Professor Renker, "and that exactly the passion and enthusiasm that people in the U.S. bring to listening to music is the same passion and enthusiasm that they used to bring to poetry back before the era of recorded music." The class takes poems from the history of English poetry and pairs them with contemporary rocks songs. It's been very popular both times that Professor Renker has taught it, so much so that there's always a waitlist of students wanting to get in.
"I wrote fan letters to musicians to see if they would possibly meet with the class, and both times that I taught it people said yes. So both times I had a bona fide rock star doing a video conference with the class. It was kind of amazing," said Professor Renker.
The first time Professor Renker taught the class, the rock star featured was Rivers Cuomo, the frontman for the band Weezer. "Even when I told the students that this was going to happen, I still felt like I was making it up. It was great. Cuomo was so interested in what we had been doing with his songs. And once I was able to schedule with him, I made his songs a focal point of the class. We probably studied eight or ten songs."
The second time she taught the class, she featured Matt Berninger of the up-and-coming band, The National. Professor Renker credits the Digital Media Project with making the necessary technology work for the conferences with both performers.
Professor Renker leaves an impression on her students. Jon Theiss, who took the Poetry/Alternative class with Professor Renker in Winter 2007, said "She's an incredibly open, flexible professor who has the ability to navigate her students' perspectives and weave them into her lecture. She doesn't just wait until someone offers the "right" answer: she actively uses discussion as a tool to guide students through the necessary analytical steps required to fully understand a text. Professor Renker gives back as much as she expects. She offers herself to students as a guide, role model, sympathetic ear, and ally…. [She] engages her students in a way which shows her passion for English studies, as well as her love for teaching."
