Teaching Philosophy

“Good learners, like everyone else, are living, squirming, questioning, perceiving, fearing, loving, and languaging nervous systems, but they are good learners precisely because they believe and do certain things that less effective learners do not believe and do.” -Postman and Weingartner (31)

This quote from Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity captures what I feel to be the essence of learning, and it is key to what I do as a teacher: creating the conditions of learning that support students’ development of effective learning behaviors. For students in general education composition courses, this approach prepares them for transferring their learning into new classroom and extracurricular contexts. And I believe this literacy learning framework is just as integral in graduate courses as it is in undergraduate courses, as graduate students learn to read, research, write, and reflect in new ways about their work in the discipline. 

I use Brian Cambourne’s phrase conditions of learning to think about the various components of my classroom ecology—that physical, discursive, and affective space that is comprised of my students, me, and the rest of the “stuff” of the classroom. I support my students’ learning through attending to these various elements of the learning environment and thinking about how they intersect and work together. Through modeling research and writing practices, being explicit about expectations for writing and classroom engagement, and allowing space for students to try new kinds of writing, writing in new genres, and writing about topics that are important to them with the benefit of feedback, reflection, and repeated practice, I work to help students understand writing and becoming a writer as a recursive process.   

I also believe that grounding students’ learning in what they want and need to know makes for a meaningful classroom experience. The general education composition classroom requires a safe, encouraging place for genuine inquiry, providing the context for meaningful learning that extends beyond one semester’s work. Inviting students to develop collaborative writing projects that respond to needs and possibilities they perceive in their communities encourages writing practices valued in both professional and social contexts. Allowing students room for play with texts strengthens their opportunities for making their voices heard in a way that matches their experiences and perspectives and prepares students for the writing they will do in other areas of their academic and professional lives. I work toward this through exposing students to alternative genres—like the I-Search paper—working with them to interpret assignments, helping them make connections between their personal interests, prior knowledge, and the assignment, and allowing them to create texts in alternative ways.  

While the inquiries and interests and experiences of students shape course content and methods and vice versa, it is also important for my teaching to highlight how students learn significantly from each other. As a teacher researcher, my approach to understanding and teaching rhetoric comes through a pedagogy that emphasizes how rhetorical decision-making influences and is influenced by students’ work with each other—how writing students understand themselves as responsive and responsible to each other. Through attention to discussion of contemporary public texts that highlight responsible rhetoric and through careful framing of peer review activities, I encourage students’ development of responsible rhetorical practices. 

In these approaches, paying attention is inherently important. Through reflective writing and thinking about their role in the classroom environment, students can develop a self-concept of rhetorical and responsible agency, paying attention to their prior knowledge, beliefs, and emotions, to their responses to the rhetorical situation, to their awareness of being influenced by and influencing others, and to how each of these things contributes to the rhetorical decisions they make. As teacher, in listening to my students, in reflecting upon their work and my own, and in re-shaping and re-imagining the work that happens in my classroom based on these observations, the work I do with students is continually improving.