Instructor Spotlight: Dr. Wiebracht
Dr. Wiebracht currently teaches English at Stanford OHS, and he created a new course this year, Critical Theory: Canon and Counter-Canon, along with a publishing non-profit titled Pixelia Publishing.
Dr. Ben Wiebracht, an English professor at Stanford OHS, has always enjoyed reading since childhood, and this love for reading drove him to pursue a career in English. Wiebracht notes how “it dawned on me part way through college [that] ‘oh, you can actually make a career teaching and basically talking about literature.’” He earned a Ph.D. in English at Stanford and later focused mainly on love stories from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. He has had a lot of different experiences with teaching, having taught at Stanford University and different high schools. Dr. Wiebracht discovered OHS after hearing about it through a friend and began teaching a single section of MWA in 2016. He absolutely fell in love with OHS and said to himself, “[that] this is what I want to do.” After that, he was able to become a full-time instructor and has created not only a new course at OHS, Critical Theory: Canon and Counter-Canon, but also started a publishing site called Pixelia Publishing with Dr. Hendrickson, another OHS professor, which provides a platform for student-teacher collaborations. I sat down with Dr. Wiebracht to talk to him about these English ventures and more.
In Critical Theory: Canon and Counter-Canon, students explore and discover the value of lesser-known works of writing. Dr. Wiebracht says he has wanted to create this course for a while, but didn’t know if the topic was something that would be of interest to students. But so far, he says the classes are great with lively and engaging discussions! He explains how as history goes on, the texts that are studied and remembered get funneled down and reduced to what is known as the canonical pieces, and these pieces become hardened into what is taught and read. But by going out of the way and going back to a certain period to introduce new texts, Dr. Wiebracht says that we can counteract this hardening process and invite new ideas and perspectives about a certain author, period, or genre to better understand them.
Dr. Wiebracht says through designing this course, he himself has been introduced to out-of-the-way texts and authors that he hadn’t known about before. He uses the example of Anna Letitia Barbauld, who is an author discussed in the class, but has been mostly forgotten about as history has passed on. Wiebracht hadn’t read anything by Barbauld until this past summer when he explored her poetry. He describes this newness of an author as the most fun for teaching because everyone, including him, is part of the process of discovery together.
Dr. Wiebracht’s main goal for the students in the course is that they begin adopting the attitude towards literature of exploring the works that don’t receive as much attention. He says that “more important than any one of those texts or all of them together is a mindset, an attitude towards literature of exploration and curiosity and testing the limits and going and checking out the stuff that other people aren’t paying attention to.”
Another journey Dr. Wiebracht has started is his publishing site that he created with Dr. Hendrickson about a year ago, Pixelia Publishing. Dr. Wiebracht describes Pixelia Publishing as “a non-profit publisher whose goal is to provide a platform for original scholarship undertaken by students and teachers working together”. With this joint product, the teacher and all of the students’ names are listed on the front page of the books that are written. As of now, Dr. Wiebracht has published a critical edition of Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme with seven other students. There are also two Latin books published by Dr. Hendrickson and other students for use in classrooms.
Dr. Wiebracht says that his motivation in creating Pixelia Publishing and forming these student-teacher collaborations is to provide students with an audience that they can address through their writing. He admits that in high school English essays, teachers ask the students to imagine a reader who they are writing to, but he says that’s “one of the more ridiculous things we say as teachers” because “students know good and well they have no such reader…they have one reader, and that’s the teacher.” He further explains how this can send the message to students that scholarship in literature seems like “an intellectual performance you put on for your teacher to show how smart you are…and that is absolutely not what scholarship is.” He says with this feeling emerges a pattern that can make writing seem “simultaneously stressful…and pointless because you don’t have a real reader for it.” Pixelia Publishing gives students the opportunity to use what they’ve learned and “do something real with it. Address this real audience we keep asking our students to imagine. How about we just give them that audience and let them speak to it.”
Dr. Wiebracht has helped provide this platform for students with the collaboration and publishment of a critical edition of Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme, his first publishment with Pixelia Publishing, which is used for readers of Jane Austen, an author Dr. Wiebracht thoroughly enjoys reading. This book is the first in a series titled Forgotten Contemporaries of Jane Austen. The rationale for this series is similar to his new class, he explains, saying, “we can understand Jane Austen better if we see her among her contemporaries.” He clarifies that the great writers, as well as the forgotten ones of her day, can be used to understand Austen better. The book discusses the obscure poem titled “Bath: An Adumbration in Rhyme” by John Matthews, which Dr. Wiebracht found shared similarities with Jane Austen. The original plan for Dr. Wiebracht and the students was to publish an article about the poem on a Jane Austen blog, but the idea to turn it into a critical edition came from Dr. Hendrickson. Once the article was published, several students from the article stayed to work on the book and dive deeper into the topic, which is published on Pixelia.
But this benefit isn’t only for the readers, but for the audience as well. Dr. Wiebracht explains how readers’ feedback has been “enthusiastic” and that the books have received critical praise from the academic press. He noted with pride that one of the books won the 2022 Ladislaus J. Bolchazy Pedagogy Book Award with another book being a finalist for a different award!
As of now, Dr. Wiebracht and Dr. Hendrickson are the only two teachers associated with Pixelia Publishing, writing books about English and Latin. But as the non-profit begins to grow, Dr. Wiebracht says he can imagine other sorts of works as well. “I’d be interested to see what teachers in the hard sciences might come up with.”
Dr. Wiebracht is an incredibly passionate teacher at OHS, and his love for English and reading is strongly conveyed in each class. He describes the students at OHS as having a “sheer intellectual energy every bit as radiant as [a university] student.” He says that he ends most classes with an “adrenaline high.” He loves the community at OHS and the relationships he has built with students over the years. Through his amazing accents and incredible personality, each class with Dr. Wiebracht is enlightening.