Professor strives to bring intellectual conversation to classroom setting
As most people travel through their lives – lives driven by schedules, to do lists and assignments – Patricia Gantt, an English department professor is someone who truly enjoys the things she does and is happy along the journey of life.
She shares many stories and offers an aura of open comfort and a no-nonsense attitude to her students. She does not possess the sugar-coated, artificially happy facade of someone trying to impress others; her smile and uplifting attitude are the product of joy in her profession.
“I teach because I can make a difference in this world. When I get into a room with my students and the subject matter I’m teaching, I have so much fun I don’t ever want to quit,” Gantt said.
She said teaching is a selfish profession because of everything she learns from her students, as well as what she gets to teach. Gantt is the instructor for the teaching literature, multicultural American literature and young adult literature classes at Utah State University. On any given day, Gantt can be seen arranging her students in a circle to encourage interaction and scattering humor and anecdotes to help her students feel accepted.
“I want the class to be an intellectual conversation, not just a funnel from me to my students,” Gantt said. “It’s not only an opportunity to talk about my favorite authors. We learn together.”
She feels great passion for the authors she teaches in her classes. When asked who her favorite author is, she is very noncommittal because there are too many.
“I tend to have a serial honeymoon with whomever I am teaching or studying,” she said.
Her excitement and passion for literature began with her youth in western North Carolina, where she had a very close family and “grew up surrounded by books,” she said.
Her open-minded ideals and attitudes can also be attributed to living in the South, she said.
“My growing up made me believe in people and in learning and in knowledge as a way to live more fully,” Gantt said. “My parents were fine people with good solid values which they tried desperately to impart to me. My parents taught me to be endlessly curious, to respect all people and to work very hard.”
She decided she wanted to be a teacher after she attended her first professional English meeting with her mother, who was a teacher. She said she grew up surrounded by teaching and saw “behind the scenes” all the work which happened after school and on the weekends.
Gantt received both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then returned to UNC after 20 years of teaching in public schools and community colleges in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia to receive her doctorate degree. She was also given a scholarship opportunity to attend Corpus Christi College at Oxford University in England for the summer of 1985.
Gantt and her husband, Tom, to whom she has been married for 35 years, moved to Logan from North Dakota, where she taught at Dickinson State University, because of the outdoor opportunities in the area, the milder climate, and because she “requires mountains.” Gantt particularly wanted to work at USU for the “opportunities at this tremendously intellectual environment.” She said she feels she can be more than a teacher, but also a colleague with “dynamic, bright people who are so warm and inviting.” Most of all, Gantt seized the opportunity to work with tomorrow’s English teachers in her classes.
“You can have so much influence on the classrooms that will be. It is both invigorating and terrifying,” she said.
“Teach with both your head and your heart. The best learning takes place when there is a marriage of intellectual rigor and deep caring about the lives of your students 20 years after they had your class,” Gantt said of her teaching philosophy.
Along with her teaching responsibilities, Gantt is working on research publications. Her next one to be published was done in collaboration with Lynn Meeks, also a professor in the English department, titled, It Really Works: Ideas from Award Winning English Teachers, which is based on the methods and philosophies of high school and university teachers. Another book is in the works which focuses on oral histories of women in the Depression era. She has been published other times, given conference presentations across the country and abroad, and awarded several scholarships and awards, but is still very humble about her achievements.
Whatever she is doing, Gantt seems to enjoy. She exudes the positive attitude of one who truly lives her life and does not want to change that.
“When I moved here, it was because I was picking the place I hoped to stay until I toddle away on my walker,” she said.