Teacher, Scholar

But aside from his prolific writing and extensive field research, it is Coles's role as an acclaimed teacher that has marked him as a prominent and dynamic figure on the Harvard faculty.

Coles credits psychoanalyst Erik Erikson for inspiring him to become a teacher. After returning to Boston from Mississippi, Coles became a section leader for Erikson, who was then teaching at the College.

"This was the beginning of my teaching career," Coles says. "I've never left teaching since then, other than to do fieldwork."

Coles describes himself as being almost in equal parts both a teacher and a student. Coles says that he is interested in the very different ways that students throughout the University respond to similar texts. "Teaching has been part of not only my intellectual life, but also my spiritual life," he says. "These distinct viewpoints have taught me a lot about the meaning of any particular novel, that the meaning has to do not only with the novel itself, but also the reader."

In his three courses this semester--General Education 105, a freshman seminar, and a medical school conference course -- Coles's students all read and discuss the short stories of Raymond Carver.

"When I teach Raymond Carver's stories to College students, Medical School students or Business School students, the subject matter remains the same, but the audience, the students, the assumptions, and the aspirations of the students vary."

"The text takes on a different light, depending on where it's taught."

It is these differences, these variations in interpretations, that deeply interest Coles. "These variations bring together my interests as a teacher and my interests as a reader. They remind me as a reader that there are other readers who may have a different take on the reading I'm doing," he says.

Another technique that Coles brings to his teaching is what he describes as his version of "interdisciplinary" learning: using literature together with art as a vehicle for social reflection. In both his freshman seminar and General Education course, for example, Coles juxtaposes Edward Hopper's paintings with Carver's short stories.

"The Hopper street scenes and the people who he gives us in his paintings are ordinary American people struggling with the complexities of human life: the strains, the opportunities, the difficulties," Coles explains. "This is the same life that Carver evokes in his fiction."

Aside from his teaching at the University, Coles takes the same "interdisciplinary" approach to the fourth graders he teaches at the Martin Luther King Jr. School in Cambridge. In what he calls an "informal art seminar," Coles shows slides of Picassos, Renoirs and Hoppers to his students and discusses with them their reactions to the art.

"I use drawings and paintings and slides to get them to imagine stories connected to the pictures, and I get them to write what they have imagined," Coles says.

For Coles, teaching is an integral part of his life because it nurtures the other aspects of his multi-faceted career. "There is a constant nourishing going on between the experiences of students and my fieldwork. I learn from the students about their own lives, and in a sense I learn about America."

Currently, Coles is developing a course that would use community service to explore intellectual and moral reflection.