Professor applies world perspectives to teaching

In a small, dimly lit corner office of Burrowes Building, Melinda Wilkins, professor of English and American studies, sits amid a shelf overflowing with literature. To her right is a computer with a screen saver of flying windows, personifying Wilkins. Much like the literature she teaches, Wilkins is a window into a world of unique perspectives, insight and experience.

For an individual who spent much of her life living in places such as Holland, Japan, Malaysia, Italy, England and Belgium, this uniqueness seems like an inevitable attribute. However, the medium she uses to convey these perspectives and experiences -- teaching -- is a track far from her intended life path.

In pursuit of a degree in veterinary medicine, Wilkins enrolled at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University to continue a family tradition. The second day of a grueling chemistry course presented a fork in the road.

Thinking there was no surviving the demands of a veterinary medicine curriculum, Wilkins turned to English. This was the beginning of the journey that brought her to the University.

(Collegian Photo/Mike Morones - click for full size image)

To her, teaching is more than just feeding students information and sending them home, she said. As she spoke of teaching, her demeanor reflected the seriousness with which she approaches what she calls a vocation and gift.

"It encapsulates the way I feel," she said.

Wilkins said she sincerely believes the key to students' learning processes is that they are intellectually exchanging ideas.

"(Teaching is) a constant engagement to create goodness and ethical responsibility to yourself and those of the social world," she said.

This philosophy is one she enlists in molding her two sons. At the slightest mention of Thomas, 15, and William, 9, a maternal glow is revealed even in the dim lighting of her office.

"They are very strong children," she said. "I love that in them."

Wilkins employs the same method of raising her sons in the classroom. She said she intends to lay a foundation for them -- encourage critical thought and generate questions such as, "who's telling the story? why that story? what side are you on?"

More than anything, she said she hopes her children and students alike shed the weight of conformity and ignore "navel gazers," which she defined as those who fail to look out at the world because they are too busy looking downward and inward.

"I want them to think for themselves," she said. "I think conformity is a disease."

Wilkins said she wants her children to have independent minds.

"I want them to have intellectual independence," she said, "even from their mother."