Teaching Philosophy
When I wrote my first teaching philosophy more than a decade ago, it seemed easy. I was eager to tell potential employers and colleagues how I had figured out the nuances of teaching, despite having spent very little time actually teaching. Now, this task frustrates and challenges me. It is a balancing act between declaring an approach and embodying that approach. It feels liberating to be able to set to paper the most fundamental declarations of my approach to the profession, idealism run amok; that idealism feels nearly impossible to embody and sustain. But this seems to be my philosophy: Do what feels impossible in the hopes of being liberated. I try to push my students and myself beyond what is expected and into exciting, critical, interpretive, and creative spaces of inquiry.
My approach to teaching is shaped by the sum of my educational experiences. From my time as a student--both undergraduate and graduate--to my time as an educator, I have been curious about my instructors and my own instruction. In my classes, I often ask many “how” and “why” questions: “How does the tone shift in this poem?” “Why does Iago refuse to speak?” “How does the rhetorical situation of this event shape the response?” However, my favorite question is “So, what?” If my students were asked to describe me or my teaching in a single phrase, this might be how they would respond.
As an instructor, I see my role as one of a problem-maker. I want to problematize the world in such a way that students are able to see the underlying assumptions that shape everything from poems to films to sports fandom to video game narratives. My goal is to push my students to explore topics through critical writing, through authentic learning that wants to better understand the world in which we live. I invite my students to take ownership of their academic careers by writing about things in ways which integrate their prior knowledge and experiences, and which integrate multiple disciplines. I encourage them to take risks and to be ambitious in their thinking, while stressing the importance of being able to write in multiple genres for multiple audiences.
Similarly, I take a problematizing approach to my teaching, looking for the points of resistance and curiously probing my own approaches and assumptions. I try to take risks and be ambitious in my approaches to teaching, knowing that each class is an audience of multiple personalities, skill sets, goals, and prior knowledge. Since I stepped into my first developmental writing class as an instructor more than ten years ago, my “teaching philosophy” has been under revision. To say that I have one (or even a few) methodologies for teaching seems counter to what I actually teach: process and discovery. My teaching philosophy seems to embody the writing/reading/thinking processes that I teach because it evolves with each class I teach as I discover new methods, concepts, strategies, and students.
More specifically, my approach to the physical and online classrooms rely on a flexible set of strategies, influenced by personal experience and research. Paulo Freire’s (1993) Pedagogy of the Oppressed is one of the most influential books I have ever read. I begin each new class, each semester by assigning Chapter Two, which addresses the “banking concept” of education. I talk openly about my stance as one who stands somewhere between critical constructivism and pragmatism. I take to heart Malcolm Knowles’ (1984) theory of andragogy by foregrounding why we will discuss the things we will inevitably discuss in class. I do this because I want each student to own an equal share of (and be responsible for) her or his education. Students often comment that their instructors have never talked to them about why they are being asked to learn specific content, only suggesting or implying that the course is important because it is important.
I thrive on interrogating the seemingly obvious power structures in ways that engage students. One of my favorite classroom activities involves sending students out of the classroom to use their phones to take photos of various stickers or posters--on walls, on cars, on backpacks--and interrogating those photos. We begin a semiotic process that allows them to use a low-risk sign (poster or bumper sticker) to see how that sign can communicate highly valuable information. This low-risk, high-reward strategy eases students into a complex process of meaning-making and meaning-communicating. Likewise, another favorite activity is to ask students to analyze the layout of the classrooms we inhabit. This allows them to see the artificiality of power structures in higher education and empowers them to share the intellectual space with me, to own at least a part of that space.
My philosophy is to help guide students through content while making them aware of the powerful contexts in which their learning takes place. I want them to own their learning of and teaching about new ideas in the same ways that I try to embody this notion for them. I relish my position as the most curious teacher-student in a room full of student-teachers, to use Freire’s language. Most days, this approach feels like impossibly liberating.