Kent L. Brintnall, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Kent L. Brintnall is an associate professor in the department of religious studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His teaching focuses on gender and queer theory, film studies, cultural studies, and literary theory. Brintnall is the author of Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure (University of Chicago Press, 2011). His current projects include a collection of essays on Georges Bataille and the study of religion (co-edited with Jeremy Biles) and a solo-authored book on Bataille and queer theory.

“Remember, They are Not Little Doctoral Students”

The best piece of teaching advice I ever received came from Joyce Flueckiger while I was a teaching assistant at Emory University. “You must remember,” she began, with emphatic gravity, “they are not little doctoral students.” Given in the context of my worries about the amount of reading I planned to assign in an undergraduate course, Flueckiger’s advice helped me reconsider my notion that I must provide a comprehensive treatment of a topic. Her counsel still rings in my ears when I create or evaluate assignments or when I talk with students about study habits and professional goals. The core principle, as I understand it, is that relying on my recollection of what motivated me and interested me, what I found valuable, and what I was willing to do as a (doctoral) student may only hinder, not help, my teaching.

As I have tried to meet the specific challenges of teaching in a stand-alone MA program, Flueckiger’s comment has proven especially pertinent. Master’s students are not doctoral students, even if — perhaps especially if — they aspire to that status. If I can’t rely on my experience as a PhD student, on what can I rely as I prepare my Master’s students to become doctoral students? And what about those who have no desire to cross that threshold? Flueckiger’s observation reminds me to attend to the specific details of the learning environment at hand to make sure I am teaching to the actual, rather than the imagined, situation. In other words, I must be reflective about the context in which I am teaching and I must engage in conversation to understand it. This means that there are very few one-size-fits-all strategies, and that the most useful concrete teaching practice I can develop is the capacity for reflective adaptation.

What, then, are the contextual details of which we must be mindful when teaching in a stand-alone MA program? First and foremost, given their relative scarcity, most professors of religion were not trained in such a program. Even if it were advisable to rely on our memories of graduate education, we have no store of experiences that mirror our students’ context. Most of us received Master’s degrees either en route to the PhD or at institutions that granted PhDs. In either case, we interacted with doctoral students. While completing my Master’s degree at the Graduate Theological Union, for example, I had several seminars that included doctoral students: I saw how they analyzed texts, formulated questions, selected research topics, and handled the pressures they faced. At the same time, because I was getting a MA in a context where most students were pursuing MDiv degrees, I gained a sense of what it meant to study religion as an academic pursuit rather than as one dimension of vocational preparation. Because the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, has neither doctoral programs in the humanities nor a professional track for those studying religion, students in our stand-alone MA program have neither aspirational nor comparative examples among the student body from which to form their identities.

Without doctoral students as aspirational models, professors not only unwittingly and unwillingly become exemplars, but must sometimes intentionally place ourselves in this position. As much as we don’t want our students to feel compelled to write or think like us, we must also recognize that unless they learn to write and think like us, they will probably not succeed in the academy. For me, this has meant being forthcoming about my writing practices and work habits, and my struggles with confidence and professional jealousy. It has meant talking with students about “positioning” and “marketing” themselves. It has meant offering very specific advice about how to manage progress through the MA program. It has also meant being attentive to the ways in which I become a site of both unhelpful admiration and unacknowledged hostility. At the same time, it has created opportunities for reflection on and conversation about whether students genuinely want a career in the academy. By detaching the PhD from the MA, students must choose the former, rather than stumble into it as an inevitability.

Students in a stand-alone MA program are making their initial foray into graduate education. This means professors must help students identify and develop the skills they need to succeed at this endeavor — and understand that these are different skills than those required for success as an undergraduate. As I often tell students, while curiosity and passion may be sufficient to distinguish oneself as an undergraduate, an enhanced level of discipline and rigor is required at the graduate level. Or, more pointedly, I tell them that most A-level undergraduate work is B-level graduate work. Grasping this distinction is tougher in a stand-alone MA program. Because such programs often teach undergraduate and graduate students in the same courses, MA students are surrounded by undergraduates from whom they must distinguish themselves. This can be especially challenging for students who go “straight through” or who enter the MA program at their undergraduate institution — weeks prior, they may have been an undergraduate, perhaps in the same room with the same teacher among the same colleagues. As they begin to grasp the difference — realizing they are more familiar with key concepts, have more effective strategies for engaging difficult texts, possess greater sophistication in formulating questions — it can also be a challenge to understand that surpassing undergraduate expectations is not necessarily equivalent to acquiring graduate-level skills.

To help students adjust to graduate school expectations, I must be both fiercely and compassionately honest. I must simultaneously encourage them, provide frank diagnoses of their strengths and weaknesses, and help them develop strategies for improving. To strike this balance, and not become another voice that reinforces feelings of inadequacy, I must spend time getting to know them — their personalities, the kinds of criticism they can bear, the forms of encouragement they need, the types of resistance they will show — so that I can be the mentor they need at this moment of personal, intellectual, and professional transformation.

The absence of PhD students can also challenge professors. There are rich rewards in working with MA students, rewards that come from interacting with students capable of more advanced work than undergraduates, and from helping students formulate plans for their future. But these are not the rewards that come from helping someone complete graduate education, taking the final steps of professional formation, and becoming a full-fledged colleague. MA students are beginning graduate study. They are not yet versed in the field’s literatures, questions, and controversies. They need write only a thesis (if that) and not a dissertation. Insofar as most of us were trained to think that the apex of professional success is training doctoral students, we must resist the temptation to treat all graduate students as doctoral students.

Like any teaching context, the stand-alone MA program requires that professors be aware of each student’s unique needs. Not only must we be mindful that Master’s students are not yet doctoral students, but we must also remember that they don’t all intend to seek that “prize.” Given that stand-alone programs may require less of a commitment of time and financial resources and less of a commitment to a new personal and professional identity, these programs are more likely to attract students uncertain about their future generally or their capacity for graduate work specifically. The vast majority of students in the University of North Carolina, Charlotte’s MA program want to get a PhD and become college professors. But a significant number want only the Master’s degree, planning either to teach in community colleges or to pursue other vocational goals. Another handful simply enjoy the pursuit of ideas and have no desire for a credential. A few are prepared to do graduate work — most need help fine-tuning their abilities and some are unlikely to develop the necessary skills. Most have to work at least part-time to support themselves, given our program’s limited capacity to provide financial assistance. Because most of us who are teaching in stand-alone programs knew that we wanted to pursue a PhD and had the ability to pursue these goals successfully, we must be mindful that our personal experience of a Master’s program may bear little relation to our students’. But we also have a chance to think about the rich array of opportunities a Master’s degree in religion opens up for them.

Students’ varied vocational goals and levels of scholastic preparation require that I give them significant individual attention. Whether a student wants to work for a nonprofit advocacy organization, be certified to teach religion courses at the local community college, or land at a Research I university, I must help them identify the skills required and create opportunities to develop them. This has forced me to abandon narrow conceptions of academic and professional success and to think more expansively about what a graduate degree means and what work in a graduate program should look like. Rather than a paper, why not let students craft a syllabus that addresses the questions pursued during the semester, along with a short essay that explains their design choices? Rather than a research paper, why not let students draft a legislative memo addressing a public policy question that relies on ideas from the course? Rather than crafting assignments on my own, why not negotiate assignments that will be useful to each student? And why think of a Master’s-level course as a fully preplanned experience, rather than a work in progress? I have learned that I need to check in to determine whether a class is working: Is the reading load excessive? Is it too hard? Does our time together add value to the reading? Are the assignments helpful for students’ particular learning and professional goals? I ask students about their reading and writing habits, how well they are negotiating course material, and how class sessions are enhancing (or inhibiting) their confidence. I engage them as conversation partners — in an ongoing fashion, formally and informally — to assess how well courses, assignments, and readings function.

The advice to remember that my students are not “little doctoral students” was initially helpful because it dislodged my unspoken assumption that my students were me (and my unspoken fantasy that they wanted to be me). As I have worked with Master’s students in a stand-alone MA program, this advice has helped me rethink the notion that graduate students are self-directed — or, more precisely, to rethink the specific ways and areas in which they should be self-directed. I always assumed that graduate students would require less time and attention, but I have discovered that they require more because it is more difficult to generalize what they need. And in a stand-alone MA program, where professional goals and academic preparation vary more widely, such generalization is even more difficult. This means that the best advice I can offer for teaching in this context is to be mindful of its unique features and to be willing to engage students as individuals. Providing this kind of attention is never an easy task and can occasionally be an unwelcome one. As writing deadlines loom or service commitments impinge, I sometimes find myself resenting the distance between the graduate student of my fantasies and the graduate student in front of me. At the same time, working with Master’s students in such a focused, individualized fashion has made me much more reflective — more self-aware, more conscious, and more intentional — regarding my choices about my identity as a scholar and teacher.

When I was initially mulling over this essay, the metaphor of “gate-keeping” kept popping up as a way to explain the stand-alone MA program’s function. But reflecting on what my colleagues and I strive to do, I settled instead on the image of locks in a canal. Operating a lock is delicate business; it requires acute sensitivity to each ship’s size, shape, and cargo, to where it is and where it needs to be, to how quickly it can be moved, and to whether it needs to cross at all. Thus, like different ships with different cargoes and destinations, students in stand-alone MA programs are specific individuals in a fairly unique context that require careful, reflective attention.