TEACHING PHILOSOPHY: engaged teaching, reflective/diffractive scholarship

My ideas about teaching are continually evolving, becoming more complex and sophisticated. I hope this to always be the case, a philosophy-in-revision and a work in progress. I’ve been a teacher for nearly fifteen years: I was a high school teacher for four years and a college instructor for the last decade. I’m a different teacher today than the first day I stepped into my high school classroom so many years ago. I’m a different teacher today than I was last year—a result of being completely invested in the craft and technique and science of teaching. I both recognize and am passionate about my role as an instructor, facilitator, mentor, listener, evaluator, challenger, defender: teacher. Because of that, I am engaged in my own personal growth as a teacher. That means practicing, reading and studying about pedagogy, self-reflection and diffraction, seeking out opportunities for evaluation, participating in moments that both affirm and challenge my notions of what it means to teach and to be a teacher. I think it is both dangerous and disingenuous for teachers not to participate in the learning process. As a scholar I work hard to keep up with and contribute to my fields of expertise and interest (one of those interests being interdisciplinarity, which involves learning about and engaging with an ever-increasing range of ideas and skills). As faculty, then, if I’m going to teach various rhetorics, writing, technical communication, I must necessarily study writing and rhetoric and tech comm and pedagogy and add to the rich conversations within those areas. To be a teacher-scholar means to be an expert and an expert teacher.

Part of my role as a teacher is to help students engage and experiment with their own developing theories and ideas. That is, I am more interested in and motivated by notions of real learning, creativity, academic risk, error, and genuine involvement than I am in helping students achieve high grades. My approach to teaching values error and attempt, revision, experiencing thinking, writing, research as iterative and dynamic. For example, I often begin a semester of writing instruction by asking students to interrogate their writing and research processes, which inevitably turn out to be linear, product-driven, and lonely. Throughout the rest of the semester, then, we challenge those initial designs and assumptions, building toward a process of invention—for artifacts and ideas—that is iterative, reflective, and far more community-oriented. In writing and rhetoric courses, final grades are less about exacting and error-free final products (though that’s nice when it happens), and more about the work-in-progress of engaging with new, sometimes difficult, concepts and modes of composition, very similar to what Christina Cedillo calls “reading with respect.” This approach to invention and creating help adjust my courses away from the institutional shadow of grades and reorient the class toward doing and redoing. I want the grades students receive to be reflective assessments of their knowledge and skills rather than overly prescriptive judgements of a 15-week task list. I am concerned that grades, which should reflect what students have learned and can do (i.e., a measurement that helps us understand where to go next or what to revisit) have become, instead, achievements in themselves, a corruption of their usefulness. The consequence of this is that learning, academic achievement, and improvement are subordinated to whatever tasks must be completed to obtain an A. My identity as a teacher revolves around development and growth, both for the student and for myself.

As education changes (its goals, purposes, spaces, and products), it is not enough to be a knower of things. Instead, students need to know how to do things and apply that knowledge/skill to new environments and situations. Another element of my role as a teacher, then, is to facilitate students’ transition from potentially passive learning environments to more active moments of content application and knowledge creation. To borrow an old metaphor, it is not my job to fill the students-as-vessels with knowledge. Rather, my job is more like an interested observer, suggesting to students that there is knowledge to be tapped and knowledge to be made, that there are tools to use (or invent), and then watch and guide as the students find the tools, examine them, search for and create knowledge. I see students as theory-makers: they are more than capable of building new knowledge, extending knowledge, and applying their growing expertise to the discourse communities around them. I do not operate from a deficit model of instruction (which, beyond not giving students space to practice epistemology, has incredibly troubling racist foundations). Students don’t need to be saved. They need mentors, facilitators, and teachers—helpers. The classroom is/should be a space where students can experiment with their theories, challenge themselves and each other, discuss, seek out feedback. My role is to alternatively point the way and muddle the path. It seems to me that learning (a goal of education) happens on the way to Knowledge, not necessarily at Knowledge. There is something particularly powerful and meaningful in the processes of learning.

For instance, in my Composition Theory and Pedagogy course and in my Technical Communication course, students develop an artifact within a professional genre (comp theory/pedagogy generally creates lesson/unit plans for K-12; TC creates a document from their chosen profession such as SOAP notes for occupational therapy). Not only do students create the documents, but they annotate their artifacts, explaining and narrating their rhetorical choices while also referencing the course reading and theories we’ve encountered. This process foregrounds the learning and knowledge behind the artifact and not merely the final product of the artifact. This process also allows me space to give students credit for their rhetorical and technical knowledge even if the creation of the document was not expertly rendered. Knowledge often precedes ability and I want to acknowledge what students have learned.

Further, I am committed to antiracist pedagogies and practices. I regularly reflect on my own positionality and power to adjust my assignments and teaching toward liberatory practices that value an individual’s experiences, personhood, history, and goals. My pedagogy is informed by educators like Antonia Darder, Mike Rose, Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Yong Zhao. I model my critical self-reflection to/for my students, encouraging them to challenge the boundaries of hierarchies and hegemonies for inequity. In fact, when I teach research in composition, students include a positionality statement as part of their final draft. Not only does this help contextualize their location within their research, but it requires students to acknowledge the privileges they may or may not have and how that affects their positions within the academy, the community, and their evolving rhetorical ecologies.

Teaching is a generative and rhetorical act: a composition that is both continually growing and purposefully rendered. But teaching is also an interstitial act. Sometimes the liminal spaces are obvious. First year writing classes, for example, mostly include students (whether traditional or non-traditional) who are newly/recently enrolled in college. My time as a high school teacher and then as a college instructor has been crucial to my understanding of the FYW classroom as a transitional space. My FYW courses are opportunities to confront assumptions about rhetoric and composition (If I get better at vocabulary and grammar, I’ll be a better writer!) and also join the university community. I am not a gatekeeper. I want students to find their place, to learn, to leave college a changed person, ready to participate in their communities. While FYW may be a conspicuous moment of transition, all learning is transitional. And because all learning is transitional, students need a teacher who is willing to travel alongside them. Whether I’m teaching composition, comp theory, technical communication, my goal is to help students move—to move from who they were last year to who they might be next year. It’s a project we take on together. As they move, so do I. And each year I’m a better teacher for it.

A NOTE ON 2020: The Education system needs reform. The global pandemic and especially the US response to it have shown us that we need new ways of doing school. School funding, standardized testing, teacher salaries, school infrastructure, even the way we put students in cohorts by age needs to be re-evaluated and overhauled. I am actively developing and pursuing projects related to educational reform. I am always interested in collaboration.