Teaching Philosophy
I believe that the greatest
benefits that English departments can confer on their students are the critical
thinking skills with which to decode the texts in their highly manipulative
culture; an awareness of the breadth, diversity, and value of the literary
tradition; a familiarity with the resources that can help them build
and evaluate arguments both in school and after graduation; and the ability
to frame lucid, intelligent arguments.
In order to meet these
educational goals, I need to awaken students’ sense of play
and curiosity, encourage them to feel a sense of
ownership regarding the course materials, engage with
technology, and convey my own love for the
subject.
Play
Awakening students’ sense of
play and curiosity is immensely helpful in getting them to synthesize the class
material—not just to absorb it, but to evaluate it critically and place it in
context with other concepts both within and outside of the course.
Play creates a vibrant and vital learning environment.
I emphasize spontaneity and responsiveness by taking pains to keep my
syllabus flexible, so that it can be adapted to students’ requests for an
extra grammar lesson or time to workshop paper topics or more help with HTML.
I also foster students’ sense of curiosity and play by encouraging
attentiveness to external events that have bearing on the class:
I let students interject discussions of current women’s issues in the
news, for example, into conversations about literary texts in my Reading Women
Writers class. This attitude creates
an environment in which students feel that their concerns are relevant, and
fosters a sense the ongoing pertinence of the ideas we examine in literary
texts. In a similar vein, I use
outside materials from a variety of sources—from the Declaration of
Independence to the tv show Friends—so
that students understand the broad applicability and versatility of the
distinctions and skills that they are being taught.
I use a variety of formats for class discussions, including discussion
groups, online chat and MOOs (Multi-user Object-Oriented domains) to create a
sense of discovery and spontaneity for my students.
My emphasis on making
connections to a wide range of scholarly, political, and popular phenomena also
helps give my students a sense of ownership over the material, which in turn
fosters their commitment to the class and to an engagement with the issues we
discuss that extends beyond the classroom. In
my Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition class, for example, my students’
first paper is a rhetorical analysis of the website of their choice.
This exercise lets them discuss subjects that are part of their everyday
world while it illustrates the power and versatility of rhetorical analysis.
I also encourage my students to take ownership of the material by asking
them to be reflective about their work. I
assign mini-essays at the beginning and end of the semester asking them to
evaluate their own strengths and weaknesses as a writer—to discuss the skills
that they have developed and the challenges they still face.
Asking them to critique themselves helps them develop their own internal
writing standards, rather than having them imposed from above.
Similarly, I assign peer evaluations of the major papers in my rhetoric
classes, empowering my students to see themselves as readers and writers with
the agency and authority to formulate their own standards.
In literature classes, I like to interweave structured discussions led by
myself with conversations based on questions that the students have submitted
about the texts, giving them the opportunity to foreground the issues that they
find most intriguing, and conveying my sense of the value of their ideas.
Computers can be very helpful
in fostering play and ownership for students.
The presence of computers means that when we are discussing a specific
passage in a text, a student can raise a question about a particular word, look
it up in the online Oxford English Dictionary, and share their insight with the
class, contributing to both their sense of spontaneity and of ownership.
I have used online forums and chat to extend class discussion outside of
the classroom and to change the established hierarchy of myself as leader,
followed by the most talkative students, with the shy students having less of a
voice. MOOs, which combine features
of chat with the multimedia capabilities of the internet to create virtual
spaces, allow us to have exchanges in a “space” that simultaneously conveys
information about the text in question. Our
MOO for the Book of Margery Kempe, for
example, took place in a medieval hall, complete with music, furniture, and
food. Internet and PowerPoint
presentations allow me to make use of the rich visual resources now available
online to help my students build a greater sense of period in survey courses,
which in turn makes the texts more intelligible and more vivid.
To better understand the complex political and cultural forces that
produced Aphra Behn and her unique work, I created a website providing
information about her biography, about her historical period in
I do not believe that any
efforts towards encouraging play and ownership or towards the innovative use of
technology would be effective if I were not also able to convey my own
enthusiasm about the subjects. It is
important to be opinionated and to have a broad knowledge of the periods and
genres I teach in order to make it clear how important the texts we study are to
me. Just as allowing students to
introduce current events in a literature class lets them enact their enthusiasm
for the subject, so my ability to draw comparisons between Margery Kemp and
Chaucer, or to use King Lear and Hemingway in a discussion of language use in my
rhetoric class, demonstrates the way that I have internalized the concepts I
teach. Beyond conveying my
commitment to the material through the subjects I present, I also express my
enthusiasm physically, through my voice and posture.
Students respond to overt excitement; it helps them perceive the value
and inventiveness of the texts we study, and hopefully, ignites a similar
enthusiasm in themselves.
Ongoing
Development
To be able to maintain my level
of enthusiasm and do my job well, I need to constantly adapt and update my
curricula and skills as a teacher. Since
my earliest pedagogical experiences as a Teaching Assistant, I have worked on
presenting myself in a more confident and authoritative way.
I have also learned the value of diplomacy in dealing with students (such
as the one who wrote on his exam that “Daisy Miller was a stupid slut”)
whose readings have little critical merit but great obstinacy.
I have learned how to weigh and deflect pleas for leniency, and how to
make opposing viewpoints welcome, even in classes with a clear ideological
leaning. I am still working on
identifying and balancing the needs of my introverted students with the freely
expressed needs of my extroverts, and I am trying to learn how to adapt my
syllabus to preempt the period of late-semester malaise that most classes seem
to go through. In terms of
curriculum, I have adapted my rhetorical analysis paper from dealing with a
written argument to a magazine advertisement to a webpage to better integrate
the technology sections of my class. I
have also successfully included HTML units into my rhetoric classes and have
evolved increasingly clear guidelines to help my students present effective
arguments on the internet. In my
literature classes, I have learned to be more realistic about the amount of
material we can cover in a semester, and also the value of opening the semester
with a very difficult and alien text. I
have also learned the usefulness of balancing relatively difficult texts, such
as Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to
Heaven, with very popular texts, such as Jane
Eyre.
Most of my growth as a teacher
has had to do with refining my relationships with my students.
When they are comfortable with me and feel that their input is valued,
students are more willing to participate in the electric give-and-take of ideas
that is what makes teaching and learning to rewarding and illuminating.