Every year, usually at the end of the school term, I write a new teaching philosophy. I do this to reexamine what values I bring to the classroom. I think of the process of composing the teaching philosophy as an opportunity to reflect on how my thoughts about teaching have affected my teaching space. I use this philosophy as a guide for the following year. At the end of my third year of teaching college students, I have come to realize that I value creating an inclusive space where students can develop the critical thinking, research, and writing skills they’ll need outside my classroom.
My journey as a student brought me through a changed major, a bachelor’s in English, a job in the workforce, a history degree, an assistantship in communications, and a master’s in Professional and Technical Writing. Because my own experience was so varied, I craft courses that recognize that most of my students are not English majors and therefore need a type of instruction that is accessible and useful to a variety of learners.
As an instructor, I approach writing as a multidisciplinary endeavor that employs techniques from the Writing Across the Curriculum approach to student learning. Bizzell and Herzberg are often noted as having written, “Only in the writing class can students learn to demystify the academic language that they have come to college to learn, the very language that will bar them from knowledge if they cannot imitate and ultimately control it.”[1] As such, I believe it is crucial to recognize the arrival of the student into academic discourse is a series of stops and starts. I take the role then, not as an adjudicator of “proper” English or “good” writing, but as a guide through an unfamiliar landscape.
This means encouraging students to practice their academic voice while purposefully giving students space to explore their interests and their own positions within larger social contexts. This means approaching writing through a rhetorical framework — What is your purpose? Who is your audience? What do they need to know? — and appling elements of classical rhetoric and more contemporary interdisciplinary approaches to writing. For example, in teaching the structure of a research essay, my students participate in whole-class discussion about their writing techniques and experiences with research writing. Then, students break into small groups to work together disassembling a research paper, describing its parts and purposes, and exploring why these techniques are or are not effective. I have found and students have reported both in reflective writing and in conferences a deeper understanding of the organization and structure of research-based writing using this approach.
I incorporate diverse resources that both reflect a variety of lived experiences and are accessible to different types of learners. The projects I assign students are interactive, scaffolded, and a combination of group/partnered work, low-risk practice assignments, and higher-risk assessments. In one course I taught recently, students learned to organize their research in a new way by creating an infographic. We started by producing a meme about the students’ chosen topic. This gave us an opportunity to discuss genre conventions through the recognizable medium of the meme and the discourse communities online where they are appropriate. Students learned visual rhetoric by planning, analyzing, and reflecting on their meme, and they learned how to use basic visual design platforms. When students were then ready to construct an infographic about a research topic, they had already practiced the analytical, technical, and writing skills they needed to be successful. Every student in that course, from several first-year freshmen, to a homeschooled first-generation college student, to a retired returning student successfully completed the assignment.
I have found that by releasing control of what students “ought” to be writing, students are more likely to take risks in their thinking, writing style, and topics. Of course, I’m happy to guide students who need more firm boundaries to get started in their writing process. Many times, I have met with students outside of class time to discuss their projects or just talk through strategies to overcome writer’s block. I encourage students to practice writing in different contexts with daily writing prompts. In these low-risk assignments, students have written descriptive paragraphs, reflective paragraphs, reports, evaluations, and analyses because these are all types of writing they might do in other courses. I encourage students to discover the style guide commonly used in their major and to practice it rather than strictly MLA style. While students are not allowed to duplicate or reuse work from other courses, I often suggest using the students’ majors as a jumping-off point for research or writing interests and encourage students to be interdisciplinary in their approaches. This semester, I have seen drafts for papers on music therapy from a psychology student, journalistic ethics in sports writing from an undeclared major, and an exploration of gendered marketing from a business student.
Beyond the daily planning and execution of assignments and supporting students who are acquiring and developing skills, I feel I have an ethical responsibility to empower students to feel they add value to our classroom and campus community. I tell my students frequently, “You don’t have to get it right — you just have to try.” I try to embody that principle as well. I enjoy introducing students to new activities, genres, and perspectives they can take with them beyond my classroom. If it doesn’t work for them, my students know we’ll just try something else.
I arrive prepared to teach in a way that serves the students’ needs, and I leave my ego at the door. From the very first day, I tell my students that I promise to strive for fairness, to be forthright about my policies and procedures, and to be transparent about what is happening in the course. I can be flexible, I can point you to the right resources when you’re struggling, I say, but I can’t grade work I don’t have. This last year, I have made a real effort to shift-toward student-centered learning and the release of speaking rights to the student. I lecture less, and I listen more.
I often teach the catchy-titled nonfiction essay "My Dad Tried to Kill Me with an Alligator" by writer Harrison Scott Key. The story is mostly set on the Pearl River in Mississippi. A young Harrison and his brother lose their dad's fishing rod, and despite the author's embarrassment at their father's homemade dredge, the author learns a lesson about being a good father from his father's own adventurous spirit. I teach this essay for a multitude of reasons: the illustrations and visual rhetoric, the relateable themes of coming-of-age and life lessons, the reflective and wistful tone underneath a tongue-in-cheek sort of wryness, the identifyable setting for many of my students who have lived or are newly relocated to the South. It's a good story, and it introduces creative nonfiction as a genre in an entertaining way. Also, I just like the essay. About the author's own children, Key writes, "I want them to know that safety should not be the defining virtue of their lives [...]", and I think about how my students might relate to that in the classroom. I'm often not asking for simple tasks. Write. Now think about what you've written. Now write it better. Take risks. Think about what you think you know and why you think you know it. Now type that into a document and post it in Blackboard. Let me read it and give you a grade for it. It's a lot to ask a brand-new adult.
And yet, I'm committed to asking it. I bring my respect for their experiences, my committment to a transparent course management, and my innovative lesson plans and activities. I ask that my students try out that same openness, ethical behavior, and willingness to try new things. This is how I create a successful course where the student takes on the responsibility for becoming a stronger, and more secure writer.
[1] Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg. “Writing-across-the-Curriculum Textbooks: A Bibliographic Essay.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 3, no. 2, 1985, pp. 202–217. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/465624.