Teaching Portfolio
“Ideas do not exist separately from language.” - Karl Marx, Grundrisse
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read” - Groucho Marx (attributed).
“Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read” - Groucho Marx (attributed).
Teaching Philosophy
My decision to become an educator is rooted in my firm belief that a critically engaged populace is essential to the goals and functions of democracy. As an instructor of English literature and writing at the college level, I aspire to motivate students to take ownership of their own hermeneutical engagement with the world around them by exploring a variety of texts - both canonical and non-canonical - and genres -both academic and non-academic. I endeavor to employ - and consistently refine - those pedagogical strategies that best empower students to ask, and meaningfully write about questions of hegemony, ideology, social responsibility, and global citizenship. My pedagogy is grounded in three principles: 1) higher education should go beyond the vocational, cultivating critical thinking and analytic reasoning skills that speak to a wide variety of fields and life journeys; 2) the highest aim of the humanities is to foster compassion - for both others and ourselves - through viewing the world through a multitude of perspectives; and 3) teaching should take place concurrently with learning, that is to say I position myself as a perpetual student of both my colleagues and those under my tutelage. Literature Pedagogy Teaching literature begins with cultivating close reading skills but is shaped by students’ personal engagement with texts. I aim to create a classroom environment in which my students are encouraged to see pieces of themselves and their communities in a diversity of literatures, particularly in the stories of those who may appear - at least prima facie - to be quite different. My students should be emboldened to consider a worldview that is empathetic to the predicaments and needs of others. To do this hard work of critical engagement, students must learn the skills and techniques of close reading. However, writes Terry Eagleton,“the question is not how tenaciously you cling to a text, but what you are in search of when you do so” (2). This searching is a skill that can be taught. Asking questions of a text is more fruitful when it is not done in isolation. This is to say that students should be encouraged to work together to unpack a text. While reading is generally thought of as a quiet, solitary activity, engagement does not have to be! Lev Vygotsky theorized that cognitive development is a result of social interaction in which those at higher skill levels guide those at lower skill levels (86). He called the space between what an individual can do on their own and what they can do with the help of one with a higher skill set the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). My job as an educator is to scaffold students’ learning in order to maximize what is possible within their ZPD. My lessons are designed, therefore, to encourage students to use dialogue and group work to develop their own questions about a text. This can be accomplished through class discussion, Socratic circles, online discussion platforms and group annotation projects. Writing Pedagogy As with teaching literature, my approach to the teaching of writing is based in close reading and critical engagement with texts. I understand the term texts, however, quite broadly to mean any instance of meaning-making. When Derrida wrote “il n'y a pas de hors-texte” (158) he meant that once one sees language as a perpetual movement of differences, everything else acquires the same instability. For students, this means that the critical thinking skills one applies in the classroom to written texts can and should be applied anywhere meaning-making occurs. The first step in opening students up to the possibility that textuality exists outside the writing classroom is to have them work with different kinds of written texts. Students come from a variety of academic and sociocultural backgrounds and have equally diverse academic and non-academic goals. It is, for practical as well as philosophical reasons, insufficient to teach only the rhetoric and conventions of the academy. Consequently, I am obliged to teach a multiplicity of genres - e.g. narration, explanation, explication, summation, synthesis, analysis, persuasion - as they translate not only to other academic disciplines, but also to meaningful participation in other discourse communities. Reading (primarily) non-fiction rhetorical pieces in the context of the composition classroom requires a different skill set than what is needed for literature. My students are asked to play what Peter Elbow calls in the “believing” and “doubting" games as they read (163). The believing game lets students project themselves into the writer’s point of view. "By believing an assertion," suggests Elbow, "we can get farther and farther into it, see more and more things in terms of it or ‘through’ it, use it as a hypothesis to climb higher and higher to a point from which more can be seen and understood" (ibid.). The doubting game, on the other hand, is a "dialectic of propositions" (149) in which readers better understand their own opinions by reacting against those of a given text. Furthermore, I try to provide students with mentor texts that model a variety of genres so they can get a feel for tone, conventions, and so forth, as well as successful pieces written by their peers. The most important text with which student writers can engage, of course, is their own. I encourage students to work not just on their drafts, but inside them, developing a meta-understanding of their composing process. One way my students can better appreciate their process is by writing a short essay or journal entry about the steps they take to craft a piece of writing. Another is by having them actively apply multiple writerly strategies for invention/prewriting, and drafting/revising. I want my students to experiment with the idea that drafting and revising are not two separate procedures, but rather one recursive, concurrent process. Students must also engage with each others' texts, therefore peer response will be a fundamental component of my writing classroom. Students can play the believing and doubting games with each others' texts, swap drafting/revising strategies, scaffold their learning upon one another, and practice using new discourses to provide feedback. Students must, however, be taught how to provide specific and meaningful feedback during writing workshops. They need, writes Erika Lindeman, “guidance in giving constructive advice, even a language for offering helpful feedback” (205). I work with my students to give structure to their collaboration by offering specific guidelines for peer response in the form of mini-lessons, short practice sessions, student-created peer review worksheets. I borrow two strategies for responding to students’ writing from Peter Elbow. The first is to “always ask for a piece of ‘process writing’ with every main assignment. This can be in the form of a ‘writer’s log’ or a ‘cover letter’” (171). This self-reflection allows students to better understand their own writing process will help me decide what to focus on in my response. The second is to “read the whole piece before making any comments” (ibid.). This lets me see the piece as a whole before examining any constituent parts. In order to be effective, pedagogies should be tailored to the different needs and schemata of students. Teaching writing to L2/multilingual students brings unique challenges. One of the fundamental ways in which the schemata of L1 and L2 writing students differ “involves their expectations and assumptions about the rhetorical conventions and social functions of texts” (Ferris and Hedgcock 19). I endeavor, therefore, to incorporate the lessons of Intercultural Rhetoric - defined by Ulla Connor as “the study of written discourse between and among individuals with different cultural backgrounds” (2) - in the development of my assignments and activities. I aim to create student-centered literature and writing classrooms in which individuals challenge texts, each other, and themselves. By teaching students how to ask questions as they read, I hope to motivate them to extend their inquiry beyond language and towards issues of ideology. By teaching students how to ask questions as they write, I hope to help them bend their rhetorical knowledge towards self-advocacy and issues of justice. By using the techniques of collaborative learning I hope to show students the power of cooperation and community. Works Cited Connor, Ulla. Intercultural Rhetoric in the Writing Classroom. University of Michigan Press, 2011. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Blackwell, 2006. Elbow, Peter. “Options for Responding to Student Writing.” A Sourcebook for Responding to Student Writing. Hampton Press, 1999. Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. OUP, 1998. Ferris, Dana and John Hedgecock. Teaching L2 Composition: Purpose, Process, and Practice. Routledge, 2013. Lindemann, Erica. A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. OUP, 2001. Vygotsky, Lev. Mind in Society. Harvard University Press, 1978. |
The critical thinking skills one applies in the classroom to written texts can and should be applied anywhere meaning-making occurs. Sample Lessons and In-Class Activities
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