Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Oct. 23, 1986)
This is a system that demands your respect The GE tollable Com ponent Music System has it all A full function Compact Disc Piayei a Cassette Recorder with Dolby' Noise Reduction an AM FM Stereo funer and d 5 Band Graphic Equalizer And when the Boss starts to play you ve got no choice but to listen Because no one lets you experience the tower ol Music tike General Electric though he discourages discipleship. 'Bob is the most important liguri* in Harvard undergraduate life.” claims Larry Ronan, a medical student who spent six years as a section instructor in Coles's undergrad uate courses. "He helps you map out ques tions but doesn’t answer them for you." In fact, declare many former students, Coles creates a spiritual sanctuary like no other on campus "Other teachers ask you, 'How are you going to understand this or that text?'" explains Ronan "Coles con fronts you with challenging books and asks. In the face of what you have read. Says a former student: ‘Coles confronts you with challenging books and asks, “In the face of what you have read, how are you going to live your life?” ’ how are you going to live your life?’ ” Coles helps some students find answers outside traditional academe Often he holds seminars in hisliving room, toget freshmen away from the classroom atmosphere. At the Harvard Medical School hespendssum mers— without pay—guidingmedstudents whodonate their time to neightiorhood clin ics for low-income families and the home less He has also carved out a niche in Har vard's Graduate School of Education for doctoral students who want to combine his kind of documentary fieldwork with the more t raditional social sciences. Among Coles's proteges is Tom Davey, who used his clinical methods to examine the political identities of children on both sides of the Berlin wall Another is Jan Linowitz, who came to Harvard from Brow n after reading "Children of Crisis.” Under Coles's direction she mapped out a graduate program combining literature, child-development and public-policy ques tions. "Most graduate schools want you to focus on tidy, narrow issues," says Linowitz, whose* dissertation compares how the United States and Europe deal with immigrant orphan children from Asia. "Coles shows you how to deal with broader questions in an interdisci plinary way." Coles's authority in the classroom de rives in large part from his intimate under standing of how life is lived outside acade mia’s citadels of privilege. Hisown method of doing research—he calls it "field work"—is to spend weeks at a time with children in their homes—eating, talking, praying and watching television. He finds he works best with preadolescents who are neither too shy nor too anxious to impress. He listens, observes and analyzes their drawings and pai'nings, then relates the observations to wider issues of class, race, religion and the historical moment. Coles purposely does not read up on a foreign country until after his visits; this way, he believes, children become his teachers— about themselves and their social milieu. Rare trust: "Bob’s tools are innocence and anxiety," theorizes his wife, Jane, a former English teacher who for years was his sole companion on the road (the couple have three sons, one a first-year medical student at Georgetown University, one a junior at Harvard and one in high school). With these attributes, he has developed a rare capacity for gaining a child's trust. "Coles has this uncanny knack of listening tochil dren and being able to elicit their deepest thoughts,” says South African economist Francis Wilson, a close friend lie also watches them very closely and establishes nonverbul communication In this way he gets himself right inside the child's experi ence of a violent situation and can transmit and interpret the child’s feelings" Coles’s two recent booksdisplay both the