HGSE Beginnings: Mike Fink, M.A.T.'56

Posted September 11, 2013
By Mike Fink

As the academic year gets underway, members of the Ed School community -- including some faculty members who began their time here as students -- look back on how their time on Appian Way began. Today's entry: Alumnus Mike Fink, M.A.T.'56.

I came to Harvard on a Charles Smith scholarship for Providence, R.I., natives, diverted from the law school to the school of education. I had majored in English at Yale with a junior year at the Sorbonne studying French. I hoped to combine the two languages and literatures within the then-new Master of Arts in Teaching (M.A.T.) Program, designed to bring scholarly and artistic pursuits into public schools and academies.

My first impressions at HGSE in September 1955: I entered the Cambridge campus on Oxford Street and had rooms nearby. I could stroll to the little grey office-house where [Harvard University English professor] Christine M. Gibson held court, along with her colleague and mentor, I.A. Richards. In their HGSE course, they introduced the concept of learning through pictures. It was an adaptation of David Weinstein's idealistic "ulpan" method for recent refugee-immigrants to Israel. You need to learn as an infant learns, through action, not discussion. Your first words must be lived, observed, not memorized from a vocabulary list printed in a text. Our earliest guest speaker was none other than Marcel Marceau, the renowned mime, performing a story. Professor Richards asked us, on our very first assignment, opening week, to read Hugh Walpole's reduction of verbiage to a mere 500 words and to write and tell a tale using only those verbs and nouns. It was fun! Miss Gibson, a wonderful lady who appreciated my fine accent —"You speak better French than English!" she declared admiringly — asked me to play the part of a garcon, a Parisian cafe worker, in the then-new television series French through Pictures. Amazingly, that was how my wife first laid eyes on me, on the show put on in her classroom back in Providence.

At HGSE, I was introduced to an important lesson in life's career: You teach not only what you know, but also how you know. Get the class to work, to speak up, and to do, not only to listen. I have applied that guideline not only formally and factually, but fatalistically throughout my destiny. I did instruct French in the junior and senior high schools in Belmont, Mass., and in Eastchester, N.Y., but for 56 years I have been a professor here at Rhode Island School of Design. I offer electives in everything from bird study to Bible study, from journalism to film history. But in all those required courses and small seminars, I do indeed revert to what I picked up and interpreted in September 1955 on Oxford Street. That the image defines the dialogue. That the physical search is the highest form of research. That the moral of a parable depends upon the pictures created by the caption. Concrete poetry is not a fashionable concept, it is the very essence of what verse strives for. In my first composition freshman foundation assignment, I produced a book I titled Drawing with Words.

Every time I visit the exquisite realms of Harvard University, I make my private pilgrimage to the site of the office homestead of Christine M. Gibson and I.A. Richards and recall the intimate charm and profound spirit of hope embodied in those cluttered little rooms that impressed me not with grandeur but with an elevated common sense.

Mike Fink, M.A.T.’56, is a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, where he has taught for more than 56 years, making him the school’s longest-serving faculty member.

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