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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