|
 
Alumnus Kenneth Brashier, a leading scholar on Chinese studies,
was named one of four top U.S. professors. He brings his
enthusiasm for his discipline to his students through personal
insights, poetry and humor. Photo courtesy of the Council
for Advancement and Support of Education
|
Alumnus
Named Professor of the Year
By Matthew Heindl
Kenneth Brashier was recently named one of four U.S.
Professors of the Year for baccalaureate colleges by the Council
for Advancement and Support of Education and the Carnegie
Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Although Brashier
has taught for the past six years as an assistant professor of
religion and humanities at Reed College in Portland, Ore., his
roots lie in the Midwest and the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Brashier came to study at the School
of Journalism from Aurora, South Dakota (pop. 500), and graduated
in 1987. Though he did well in journalism and won some investigative
reporting awards, he was never truly comfortable with the profession,
finding himself unable to leave his work behind at the newsroom
and reluctant to disturb people for interviews at home.
“I'm not really a people person,”
Brashier says, “and journalism just wasn't a part
of my background.”
Brashier took other lessons from Mizzou, however,
that would drive his explosive interest in history. He recalls
in particular the time he was hired as a research assistant to
former English Professor James Holleran, who was then working
on a book about Edmond Campion in the Tower of London. Brashier
remembers sitting with Holleran on Saturday mornings and becoming
a specialist in the transcription of several different handwritten
versions of the same speeches. He noticed small things in the
speeches, such as sketches of hands by the original writer that
pointed to the text from the margins.
“This first sparked my interest in history
and the sense of discovery that comes with doing something new,”
he says. More than 20 years later, Brashier’s work translating
ancient Chines texts is very similar to Holleran's.
While at MU, Brashier received a Rhodes Scholarship
to Oxford University in England, where he began to focus on Chinese
language and history. Despite the wonderful atmosphere of learning
and opportunity at Oxford, Brashier says he wasn’t necessarily
impressed with the pedagogy or the quality of teaching compared
to Mizzou. He jokes that the common story in England is that the
professors turn the crinkled, yellowed pages of their lectures
with cake spatulas to prevent wear.
The same is the case with other prestigious
universities in his extensive educational career, including a
master's degree from Harvard and a doctorate from the University
of Cambridge. He says that a good university simply strikes a
balance between the quality of information and the ability to
help students understand it.
Brashier became a faculty member at Reed College
in 1998, researching the early Chinese ancestral cult of the Qin
and Han dynasties. He admits to feeling like a bit of a fraud
as a teacher since winning the award. He has received a number
of invitations to lecture on pedagogy, complicated by the fact
that he has never taken a course on teaching. He says people at
the awards ceremony chided him, “everything you say will
now be profound.”
“I’ve just mucked around in the
trenches to find what works,” Brashier says about his teaching
style. His philosophy centers around helping his students “learn
how to learn so that they can help others learn to learn,”
according to his acceptance speech.
Brashier gave examples of his teaching methods in his personal
statement to the award sponsors, including boiling the meat off
of cattle scapulae to demonstrate their use in divination and
bringing in an enormous hour-glass to help students appreciate
that the 50 minutes they spend in class can never be recovered,
a Buddhist concept of time. 
Brashier claims to have a “childlike
fascination” for the things he studies and teaches, but
it is his childlike enthusiasm that makes an impact on students.
“When I make significant discoveries
by sifting through texts written back in the Han Dynasty [202
B.C.–A.D. 220], I'm usually bouncing off the walls in excitement,” he told U.S. News. “I study people who have been
dead 2,000 years. They don't talk back. Usually.”
Archives
| Comments | Home SUBSCRIPTIONS
Subscribe
| Change Your
Address | Unsubscribe
Copyright © 2007 — Curators of the University of Missouri
DMCA and other copyright information.
All rights reserved.
An equal opportunity/ADA institution.
Published by the Mizzou Alumni Association
Questions? Comments? E-mail comments@mizzoualumni.org
Last Update:
March 12, 2007
|
