Teaching
“You have helped me see the world in a totally different way. Before I took this class I never read or wrote anything. Now I write in my diary every day and I actually read books.” -Jessica, English Composition Student
This statement of teaching philosophy was first drafted when I was a graduate teaching assistant in an M.A. program at the very beginning of my teaching career, but the statement you are reading today is the result of dozens of revisions and rewrites since that initial draft. It is the result of the influence of hundreds of students and dozens of colleagues and mentors at the handful of institutions for which I worked as a student and teacher. It is the result of hours of on-the-job classroom experience, of the completion of courses in the Ph.D. program at IUP, of hours of reading and study, and of many journal pages of reflection. Jessica was a student in the first course I ever taught, and through it all, the blurb from Jessica’s teacher evaluation is the only part of that original philosophy statement that remains. She has come to represent the core of my teaching philosophy: My primary concern is my students and their growth. My primary concern is that my students leave my course as better, more confident, writers.
Beyond that core, I have more questions than answers. Ten years ago, even two years ago, I was much more certain about what I was doing in my composition courses. Today, certainty is a commodity in scarce supply. My studies in composition, and my growth and development as a composition scholar, have continually pushed me to ask questions about what I do in the courses I teach. For example, recently the issue of student resistance has come to forefront of my thinking, primarily due to a conversation I had with my former student “Mike”. I was talking to Mike about the journal-writing project we did, and he told me how much he hated it, that he didn’t consider himself a writer, and that, in his view, only writers could like writing in journals. I wonder, how can I help students like Mike become more invested in classroom projects? How can I harness their resistance and help them to channel it in productive ways? How can I configure classroom activities so that students like Mike feel like they have something to gain by doing them?
In the classroom, I focus on my students and their literacies. I want my students to grow, to branch out. The literacies they practice can expand and accumulate, “pile up” and “spread out” (Brandt 652). Students can gain experience with the critical discourses of the academy, expanding their rhetorical savvy in the process. Also, I believe they can use writing to learn about themselves and their roles within their social networks. I reject the notion that those two objectives are mutually exclusive. I hope my students learn to use language in ways that are new to them. I hope they experiment and make discoveries. As their teacher, I can guide them, sometimes nudge them, toward those ends.
I believe that many of the goals set in my writing courses should be shared goals that arise within the community of the classroom. I believe that my students should have input about our goals, that I should listen to my students and take their concerns seriously. In other words, I believe in what Irene Ward, a former mentor, termed the “dialogic classroom”, a classroom in which the students have a seat at the table, in which the students’ voices are heard and respected.
To get a dialogic classroom working, I’ve found I must play multiple roles, expanding beyond the traditional roles of arbiter of grades and authority figure. Some of those roles include being a “fellow writer, editor, coach, facilitator, good listener, orchestrator of beginnings but rarely controller of outcomes” (Ward 180), among others. The more choices I can provide for my students, the closer they get to being authentic writers, to engaging the choices with which all writers must grapple. I never tell my students what to write about beyond the guidelines for each assignment. They have to come up with the topics they will investigate; they have to decide how they will approach those topics and they have to wrestle with all of the rhetorical choices that come with those decisions. I am always there for them as a guide, as a coach, as a voice of experience, as needed, but I want my students to understand that writing is complex. I would be doing them a disservice if I shielded them from that complexity. Writing can be challenging, and I want my students to face those challenges and meet them with confidence and vigor.
I set guidelines, deadlines, classroom rules, and ultimately, I assign grades. I believe classrooms need structure. I believe that when structure is provided and students know what is expected of them, dialogue can flourish. I have witnessed it.
So, I guide my students. I work with them. I work hard to balance the needs of the classroom community with the needs of each student individually. In striking that balance, I employ collaborative learning and I have talks with my students (conferences) one on one.
I admit, there is one more part of that original statement that still hangs around in this draft in the concluding paragraph, and that is my desire for my students, when the course is complete, to be changed, to take something out of that course that is relevant to their daily lives. Maybe that sounds naïve, but I still cling to that notion ten years later. It inspires me to continue to ask questions, to continue to find something interesting and challenging in each new group of students I teach. And so, this statement, like me, like my students, continues to evolve, yet it is my desire to reach my students, to put them first, that continues to be the glue that holds my philosophy together.
Works Cited
Brandt, Deborah. “Accumulating Literacy: Writing and Learning to Write in the Twentieth Century.” College English 57 (1995): 649-668.
Ward, Irene. Literacy, Ideology, and Dialogue: Towards a Dialogic Pedagogy. Albany: SUNY UP, 1994.
