By Amanda Alfanos, Editor-in-Chief
Elaine Smokewood, English professor, died Jan. 10 at her home in Augusta, Kan. Smokewood taught one and a half years from her home via web technology.
Using Yahoo! instant messenger and a TV screen, a student was one professor’s lifeline.
Zoe Miles, English senior, served as the voice and physical communicator for a poetry class taught in 2008 by the late Dr. Elaine Smokewood. The professor, who died Jan. 11 at her home in Augusta, Kan. and was debilitated and unable to speak.
Smokewood, 55, taught the last year and a half of her 14 years at OCU using webcam technology from her home.
“We were her lifeline and we kept her alive,” Miles said.
Smokewood utilized a speech synthesizer to converse with students via the Internet. She worked with Miles to create an atmosphere of listening.
“We set it up so that I almost did an independent study with her, but it took care of my advanced writing credit,” Miles said. “I was in charge of the technical equipment.”
Before Smokewood died, she wrote about her experiences teaching in an essay titled, “Teaching With Silence.” Smokewood wrote that she didn’t realize before she lost her ability to speak how much she associated teaching with performance.
“I saw the classroom as a stage, with myself, as teacher, positioned front and center — in the spotlight,” she wrote. “While I always emphasized discussion, encouraged students to speak, and described my classes as highly interactive, there is no denying that the self who walked into the classroom twice a week was a performer — my teaching self was a performing self.
To lose her sense of self in her teaching was “disintegrating” and “frightening,” Smokewood wrote.
“I had been teaching for nearly three decades, and, like most teachers, I had developed a persona in the classroom who was a second self,” she wrote.
While she was revolutionary in terms of teaching, there was more to Smokewood, Miles said. When she went through a difficult time, Miles said Smokewood lifted her up.
“She would just say, ‘You’re being who you need to be and accept that where you are is exactly where you need to be and be willing to move on from there,’” Miles said. “I think that kind of catapulted me into the next dimension of what my life was going to look like.”
Smokewood had a philosophy of learning from her students.
“I learned that if I listened carefully, thoughtfully, generously, and nonjudgmentally, my students would delight me with the complexity of their thinking, the depth of their insight, the delicious wickedness of their humor, and with their compassion, their wisdom, and their honesty,” Smokewood said in her essay.
Wanting to leave a legacy was too selfish for Smokewood’s nature, Miles said.
“I think she was too humbled by the life she had to share — that in itself speaks of her strength, and dadgummit, she was going to share it,” she said.
“I think that she probably felt that if she stopped doing what she needed to do that it would kill her faster.”
President Robert Henry said he had several exchanges with Smokewood via e-mail.
“It is the constant learning in teaching that makes the dreadful heart not to dreadful to bear,” he quoted of Smokewood during a Jan. 21 memorial service hosted in Bishop W. Angie Smith Chapel.
Smokewood was honored with the 2020 OCU Teacher of the Year Award and has been featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
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