October 2022
Susan Van Dyne earned her Ph.D. at Harvard and taught at Smith College for 40 years. She loves to teach in an interdisciplinary context and collaborate with students in an interactive classroom. Her OLLI course, “Turning Points: Four American Writers and Artists," explores how Annette Gordon-Reed, Chiura Obata, James Baldwin, and Hung Liu understood some of the defining moments of their lives.
You were a founder of establishing Women’s Studies as a program at Smith. That’s quite an accomplishment. How did that come about?
Coming to Smith from Harvard was a big awakening for me when I discovered the difference it made to teach a class with only women. At Harvard I’d always tutored both women and men. When they were in the class alone with me without men, my women students asked fantastic questions. When they were in a mixed group, they rarely asked questions, or spoke up, and yet they wrote beautiful papers. This was in the early 1970s, remember.
At the time, Women's Studies was just emerging as a discipline and several women faculty and I organized to establish more women-focused courses, and then a program, at Smith. But even in an all-women's college, we really had a hard time persuading other faculty we needed it. At one point, my mother said, “Women’s Studies at a women's college? Isn't that a bit redundant?”
I had to justify it, and sell it, to most of our colleagues. At the time, tenured women professors were only about 20% of the entire faculty. I was told, well, we teach nothing but women, so why a discipline? Although these were genuinely committed teachers, they tended to see women only as students, as consumers, not as subjects of study, as creators of knowledge. And, of course, if you introduce women into the curriculum, you'd have to move a lot of other things around.
My partner and I spent a very difficult decade in the 80s advocating what we called “curriculum transformation” which involved meeting with lots of Deans across the country. We explained why it was important to do this work, to integrate women across the curriculum, especially in traditional survey courses, and we ran into a lot of resistance. Yes, some schools were weaving Women’s Studies into their curriculum, but usually at the very end of a course, as a sort of addendum.
In faculty workshops we suggested that instead of putting women at the very end of a course, what would happen if you put them at the beginning? What if you started with women? We call that the “power of the first example.” Whatever you study first in a course, you're going to refer to it again and again in that course. If we could get a woman in there, up front, that would be great.
You’ve always taken an interdisciplinary approach to teaching. What does that lend to learning?
My entire life at Smith was interdisciplinary. We can’t see disciplines. Usually they're invisible to us, because we're only working in one. And so an interdisciplinary approach prompts comparisons. It makes you aware of the fact that, hey, this is a different medium that I'm using. Part of my OLLI course will highlight that we absorb information differently from these different sources. We’ll become more self-conscious about reading an essay or looking at a painting. You can make those contrasts because they're built into the course. In my experience, it's like opening your eyes to something you hadn't seen before and hadn’t felt before.
What does turning points mean?
The way I use it, turning points means where the memory of individuals intersects with American history. We’re going to look at Annette Gordon-Reed, Chiura Obata, James Baldwin, and Hung Liu. Their turning points give us access to important turning points in American histories, such as emancipation, immigration, internments, civil rights movements, but from new dimensions.
How did you come to choose these four? Is there a throughline that connects them?
I wanted to feature American writers and artists specifically, and I wanted it to be inclusive in more than one dimension, not the usual black-white dimension. And I wanted to choose representative Americans that were unexpected.
For instance, Annette Gordon-Reed allows us to look at the foundational myths that American identity is built on, but from a new starting point, from Texas. As a Texas native and African American scholar, she has a different starting point. She can show us how those Texas myths are our myths, and how they need to be rewritten. There are parts of African American history in American history that we didn't know. Through her writing, anchored in her own history that's been retold as family stories over several generations, we discovered that emancipation was only two generations ago, and therefore only two generations ago for all of us. A legacy of enslavement that needs to be acknowledged, recognized and repaired.
Hung Liu comes to America in 1984 from China. She went through the cultural revolution there. She was rusticated for four years, forced to work in rural labor camps. What strikes me about her is that she paints portraits of ordinary people but on a monumental scale. She uses archival photos of unnamed individuals as her sources. But that enlargement of an ordinary individual life in a culture that doesn’t recognize their presence is incredibly important. Her style emphasizes how transitory the historical record for these people is. She put linseed oil in the paint, and that drips down the canvas so that everything looks blurry and moving. She said her process mimics history because history itself is very blurred.
Then there’s Chiura Obata. He immigrated from Japan to study art at Cal for several decades but his teaching career was interrupted by, guess what, internment. We’ll look at both his internment art in black and white and the art for which he was most famous, the landscapes of the high Sierra, especially Yosemite. Obata says he was inspired by the “greatness of nature” in the American west. And even while he was interned he taught 600 students, from 5 to 75, how to observe nature and make art.
I'm actually hoping we can plan some optional field trips to see the Obata exhibit at the Asian Art Museum and the Hung Liu retrospective at the de Young.
And, of course, we’re going to look at James Baldwin, primarily through documentaries. I want to create an immersive experience where people could see him, not just read him. Baldwin often calls himself a “native son without a birthright.” As an African American man, he is a native son, but his condition as a citizen was always contested. He becomes a civil rights activist in order to claim back those rights for all black Americans.
Anything more you'd like OLLI members to know about your course?
The goal of this class is interdisciplinary and interactive. I’ll ask members to write personal responses to these materials, using the rudimentary skills of memoir. just very small and short reflections. I hope that over six weeks, they will have a cache of personal writing that connects them to these materials and to their own family histories.