Jo Keroes: Professor and Author
Written by Elizabeth Sommers
Photography by Chris Clark
San Francisco State University
"Mom showed me your email wondering about weaving threads. Silk is definitely the most luxurious, and also very strong. It takes dyes very well, which is why silk clothing is often in brilliant colors. It can be combined with wool, cotton and other fibers. Other fibers - wool, cotton, linen, or synthetics - are all good for particular purposes, but not generally considered as luxurious as silk."
Kathleen Sommers Luchs
I asked my sister Kathleen, who is a textile artist and historian, about the qualities of silk for a specific reason. As a teacher and writer, Jo Keroes has always seemed admirable to me. To write this piece on her teaching and writing, I knew I needed to search for a weaver's metaphor, as Jo somehow manages to weave all of her many roles into a colorful and playful design, a silken tapestry that both edifies and challenges. Here Jo is presented first as a teacher, then as author. Please bear in mind, though, that these are only a few of her scholarly endeavors, a glimpse at the whole tapestry.
Projects in the Teaching of Literature (English 717), one of the many courses Jo Keroes teaches at SFSU, was the technology-enhanced class that she invited me to visit. While Jo is both my longtime colleague and fellow professor in English Studies, I had never before visited one of her seminars. I arrived full of curiosity, having often heard from students and colleagues that Jo is a fine teacher.
I saw why they think so when I entered Jo's classroom. She had clearly established a spirit of camaraderie and trust, students sharing food, banter, ideas and laughter before the seminar even started. When Jo arrived and started with a brief discussion before turning the floor over to students, I noted her rapport with her students, her willingness to listen, and the rigorous academic standards she had set for this group of graduate students.
Having been asked to introduce myself, I explained the Faculty Showcase project to students. Jo responded that while the class is using a discussion list to explore ideas about literature this semester, in truth they hadn't used computers in the last couple of weeks. I liked this and told her students the reason: I'm always relieved when computers aren't the center of the English classroom if they aren't part of the teacher's goals for the class at that time.
As class continued, I stayed intrigued by what I heard and saw, by what I sensed. Students talked to one another avidly, free to elaborate on one another's ideas, to contradict one another with respect, confident and knowledgeable about the literary terms and the course curricula that will serve them well as teachers of literature. The seminar had the elusive but unmistakable quality of an authentic community, its members sharing the trust and rapport that a dedicated teacher can nurture.
"For as long as I have been an adult, I have been a teacher."
Jo Keroes, Tales Out of School, Acknowledgments, ix
Tales Out of School: Gender, Longing, and the Teacher in Fiction and Film, Jo Keroes' recent book (Southern Illinois Press, 1999), explores sexism, racism, ambition, relationships between students and teachers, and the dynamics of the teaching life. Jo writes about the images of teaching in novels, films and letters. As a member of her writing group, I worked with Jo and other readers on many drafts of the chapters about teaching and the erotic, males such as Sir in To Sir With Love often portrayed as heroic as they struggle to teach their initially truculent students, women such as Miss Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie more often portrayed as sinister, frustrated, manipulative or thwarted as they try to reach pupils who are often increasingly insoucient or suspicious. Whether on film or on paper, her tales are dramas that take place in the classroom, in tutorials, in the often neglected or ridiculed situations in which teachers and students find themselves. Jo Keroes draws from literary techniques, research and teaching experience to explore teachers' fictional and dramatic images, to unravel volatile mixes of feelings, ideas, participants and purposes. Jo comments in the Introduction:
This tension between reality and representation, these contradictory images and expectations, are suggestive precisely because they speak to society's need to construe images that deny and in some cases counter a reality we find dangerous and/or unacceptable. More simply, they reveal our continued ambivalence about women's power. I'm interested in exploring not just the way these stereotypes continue to play out, but also the tensions the stereotypes reveal and the ways in which certain texts work to subvert them. While we often see traditional gender patterns inscribed in fiction and film, the most interesting of these patterns show disruptions and disharmonies, inconsistencies and contradictions, resistance to and variations on familiar themes (8).
And Jo Keroes goes on to tell us just how all of this works in Tales Out of School, a book anyone interested in the classroom will read with interest.
