General education professor Daniel Malachuk has the dedication, aplomb and respect for others that's necessary to make his discussion-based, conversational classes a joy for literature students at American University. Malachuk teaches "Great Books that Shape the Modern World," "Literature Survey of American Lit" and "American Romanticism."
Malachuk prefers to have a discussion-based classroom as opposed to making his students passively receive ideas of what he thinks.
"[I prefer] a conversation because it takes two. There are so many things in students' lives and my life where we are passive recipients like with TV, PowerPoint, radio and computers," Malachuk said.
"A conversation really makes you be active, because even if [students] are not talking at the time, they are thinking, 'How can I contribute to this?' and I think that creates something in a person's mind that makes them learn better than just sitting there knowing that they are not going to contribute anything," he said.
Along with encouraging his students to take an active role in their education and avoid the passive absorption of information, Malachuk persuades them to probe the books they read for answers to universal questions.
"The books we read are talking about things that the students can talk about and should want to. It's about the questions that the authors started asking; whether it's Plato or the Bible, they asked questions. I want the students to ask the same questions and I want them to feel confident writing about and trying to answer those same questions for themselves," Malachuk said.
Malachuk specializes in 19th century literature and says he finds it interesting that writing was not so specialized then. "The authors that I really like-Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, John Stuart Mills, George Elliot-they were trying to do things with their writing... that go beyond a single discipline," Malachuk said.
"I liked their attempt to come up with a comprehensive understanding of the world that we live in as opposed to coming up with one little aspect. They felt like what they were writing was an attempt to understand everything," he said.
Malachuk has written a book titled "Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism" and hopes to send his next book to publishers by summer 2007. It will focus on American transcendentalism.
"The 19th century has things to teach us today," Malachuk said. "I focus on versions of liberalism in the 19th century that I felt had been badly misread and I wanted to read them again ... and do justice to that. This next book is much more focused on American transcendentalism and how I think they have more to teach us about how to approach human rights and those subjects."
Malachuk is also interested in jazz music and has taught jazz history classes and played in several jazz bands. He approaches jazz the same way he approaches teaching literature.
"[Everything] drops away when you are playing. You are not talking to each other but you have to listen to the other players and work off what they are doing and that is a conversation that is truly unique," Malachuk said.
"I like the closeness that you develop with people even though you may not talk about anything other than music," he said.
Malachuk received his Ph.D. in literature from Rutgers University of New Jersey. Malachuk later served as an adjunct professor and director of the writing department at Daniel Webster College before coming to AU.
"A lot of people go to grad school because they're interested in whatever subject they want to study, and they become a teacher to be able to continue studying it. I can't deny that's how I approached it," Malachuk said. "But my first year at Rutgers I went to work as a tutor in the writing center and in hindsight, I am glad because working as a tutor made me realize how much I was going to enjoy teaching"
