Students today far better prepared, says Masaryk University’s Jeff Vanderziel
Jeff Vanderziel heads the Department of English and American Studies at Masaryk University in Brno. His association with the university actually goes all the way back to 1989, when he worked there in the dying days of Communism. He took over at the English department a couple of years later – and has seen many changes over the past two decades.
“I first came to Czechoslovakia in 1989 as a Fulbright doctoral fellow. I came here to Brno at the Faculty of Sciences in the Department of Geology and Paleontology. And I was here from March of 1989 to January of 1990.”
Tell us about your experiences here at that time.
“Obviously, as you can imagine, it was a dynamic period. The first six months, not so much, doing my work, those kinds of thing.
“But the last four months were very interesting: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demonstrations here in Brno, the strike at the university.
“I tried to play the role more of observer than participant. I didn’t feel it was really appropriate, in part because I was a guest of the Czechoslovak government.
“Someone gave me a little tricolour that they were wearing, and I wore it for about a day and I didn’t feel comfortable with it. So I took it off. I have it at home, saved, with all my pictures and the posters that I took and other things.
“But it was a very dynamic time and it was really interesting to see how things were changing, and so on.”
When did you come back here to the English department?
“I came to the Department of English and American Studies in 1992. And I’ve been in the department since then.”
What were the conditions here then? Were things already moving? Or was it still a bit backwards?
“Well, the reason that I came back was because things were moving, they were trying to revamp the programme.
“So in the early ‘90s, the head of the department here at the time, Don Sparling, who had been in the country for many years, was trying to reorient the department and he was looking for someone to come in and teach American Studies.
“Because he knew me from when I was here previously in ‘89, they made the offer. I really wasn’t going anywhere in the United States at that particular time, so I said, sure.
“The money was minimal and they couldn’t have gotten a really qualified person. So I said, OK, I can come and do that. And I’ll come for a few years and do that, and then we’ll see.”
I presume people were clamouring to study English in those days?
“Yes, there was a huge demand. Obviously the skill level of people wasn’t up to where we would have liked for it to have been…”
Also I’m sure a lot of young people were extremely keen to learn about America and American culture?
“That’s certainly true. And of course there is a tradition here of a certain image of America, American Indians and those kinds of things. The Wild West. So that sort of fit in with my background.
“I do teach courses on Native Americans, indigenous peoples in North America, both contemporary and traditional cultures – in part to sort of redress the Winnetou factor, which has created a really stereotypical image of indigenous peoples in this country.”
People say today that your department has a very high reputation. Has that always been the case? Or is it something that’s been developed under you?
“I can take no credit for that whatsoever! I think that the reputation that we have developed is in part because after 1989 the Faculty of Arts and the Department of English had very dynamic leadership.
“And because we were more open to taking in greater numbers of students than perhaps they were at Charles [University, Prague], where they were trying to maintain – as they saw it – a certain level of quality, we were very dynamically growing.
“That’s something that we still try to do. Dynamism and innovation. But that goes back even to the beginning of the department in the 1920s, with Professor Chudoba. Because it was a new department, they were able to do things that couldn’t be done at older universities.
“And I think we sort of still have that tradition; that we’re able to innovate and do new things and move in different directions than perhaps more traditionally focused departments.”
What’s your relationship with Charles University? Have you got close ties? Or are you rivals? Or both?
“I would say both. I think it’s natural. If we go back and look at Masaryk’s original question about a second Czech university, there was the idea that Charles needed someone to communicate with. But that also means there has to be a certain amount of rivalry.
“I think before 1989 there wasn’t really that sense. And certainly since 1989 I think Masaryk University has tried more and more, and has gotten much closer, to Charles University in terms of quality and reputation.
“Obviously, Charles is Charles. It is the traditional centre of higher education in this country and that will never change. But I think that we are a much more comparable partner.
“In terms of English, we do work with both the English departments at the Faculty of Arts at Charles. We have very good relationships. We cooperate on conferences, we work together on various committees…So there’s a very good relationship.”
“The department is divided into three major areas: Linguistics, Cultural Studies and Translation Studies. Our strengths have traditionally been in Linguistics, with the late Professor Jan Firbas, a world renowned linguist.
“Today in terms of literature and culture I think our strengths are in looking at people on the margins of the canon in Anglo-American literature, be they Native American writers, indigenous writers in Australia and Canada, women, African-American writers.
“We’ve also become very involved recently in environmental literature, which is a big new field in the United States.
“In terms of Linguistics, the trend today is for socio-linguistics and pragmatics: the study of how people react with language, in the media for example. We’re quite strong there. And translation – we’re also quite strong in the field of Translation Studies.”
I’m not sure how much you could comment on this, but Brno strikes me as being very much a student city, in a way that Prague isn’t. Something like a quarter of the population are students. Do you think that the student experience here is different, or richer, than say in Prague?
“It depends what you mean by the student experience. Obviously Prague is the capital, so students there have opportunities that aren’t here.
“But because of the large number of students from the six different universities that are here, about 80,000 students altogether, during the school year it really does have a sense of student activity.
“And when you can really see it is in the summer, when the students are gone. The city changes its complexion completely.
“So I think that for students interacting with other students and doing things with other students, I think the atmosphere is better for them here.
“It’s perhaps closer to what I know from an American college town, or in England towns like Oxford or Cambridge, where universities are more at the centre of the life of the city’s life.”
How have the students changed in your more or less quarter century association with this university?
“Students are students. Students are in some senses the same as they’ve always been. You have students who are along for the ride, you have great students, you have weak students.
“The big change of course has been that students come in much better prepared, with a much better knowledge of English. All of our students now have been studying English since primary school, at some level.
“Often the results of those studies are not quite what we’d hope they’d be. But their English is much better. They have a much better general knowledge of American culture and British culture.
“But in many respects they still have the same gaps that students had 20 years ago, the same superficial kind of knowledge – they aren’t able to go into depth and really understand. But that’s what’s to be expected and that’s why we’re here.
“They do come in with a much better skill set that allows them to do that. Before we had to spend much more time teaching them English; now we spend almost no time teaching them English.”
Some of my friends who teach young Americans tell me that they often have a real sense of entitlement. They will argue about grades and so on. Is that something you find among your students?
“No, I don’t think so. I think in general Czech students are more passive than American students, at least in my experience. Or even other foreign students.
“When you come into the classroom here…we have quite a large number of Erasmus students coming from around Europe, and they are much more active in the classroom than Czech students are. At least, that’s my experience.
“I don’t see that sense of entitlement, so much. In a way it’s different – they expect sort of to be handed everything.
“There’s a sense that everything’s going to be given to them: Tell me exactly what I have to know and how I have to do it, then I don’t have to think, I just have to do what I’m supposed to do, and that’s it.”
How do you find their writing skills when they come here initially? Because the Czech education system is largely based on rote memory. My friend who teaches history says it’s like they’re preparing for a pub quiz.
“That is one of the biggest issues that we have. The issue isn’t so much that they don’t know how to write in English, it’s that they don’t know how to write in Czech.
“For example, in translation studies this is one of the great problems that we have. Of course we teach translation from English into Czech, which is the primary direction that it should be.
“The biggest problem we have with students is that they understand the English text, but they’re not able to create a good Czech text. That’s a huge problem.
“If they don’t have Czech writing skills, then teaching them to write in English is another whole level of difficulty.
“This is a big issue that we deal with constantly in the department and it’s something that we’re always struggling with – how can we improve, how can we work with this?
“Part of the problem is there is this lack of communication sometimes between the universities and secondary schools about what skill sets need to be directed.
“That’s a problem that we can’t redress. That’s a problem to deal with way above my head.”
