Teaching Philosophy

I believe that the occasion of the classroom is one where a student can face her writing without having to concern herself with the question of whether or not her writing is good or bad. Instead, in my class, our concern is on making a piece of writing better, with better meaning a plethora of things, but more times than not, that a piece of writing is meeting the expectations placed upon it. This manifests as classes that occur in multiple spaces, puts a great amount of emphasis on writing and revising frequently, and asks me to genuinely respond and react to my students needs.

Space(s) and how they regulate the class

Between teaching a Developmental Composition course that was on the hybrid model with face-to-face meetings in a writing center, and a FYC course that uses a traditional classroom, a computer lab, group meetings, and a digital space, Ive come to learn that each space is in itself an occasion that can be tailored for a particular purpose. For example, at the end of every unit in ENGL 106 I use the blackboard shells that are tied to my conference groups as a space for students to upload their own drafts and comment on each others. These interactions are paired with conversations that occur in our conference groups to maximize the amount of feedback we give (sometimes the digital interaction builds off the face-to-face one and sometimes vice-versa). Students then use the final lab day of each unit as an open workday, and then the last day in the traditional class is a more traditional peer-review. In this system, each space has a role in supporting students as their drafts progress.

Writing and Revising Frequently

My classes are constructed with a great respect towards writing a both a generative activity and as an act of revision. Each unit in my class is assembled so we spend the first half building our knowledge with critical readings and sample writing, where students are required to write reader responses to gather their thoughts. In the second half, in lieu of reader responses, students are expected to focus their writing on the unit paper and on the feedback they give to each other.Furthermore, the progression of the class mimics the acts of generation and revision. In the first two units we work on generating new writing in the form of literacy narratives and research papers. In the third unit, we remediate one of the previous two papers as a way to introduce the idea of global revision. In this unit, students reflect greatly on the process that occurred from revising their textual composition into a visual one. In our final unit, I bring the idea of global revision back to text, by asking my students to polish one of the first two papers and radically revise (possibilities include turning the literacy narrative into a fictional story or changing the audience of a research paper) the other.

Responding and Reacting

I like to use the first conference meeting of every unit to ask my students how effective the course is for them and make structural changes to the course. This semester I started our classes in the traditional classroom with discussions over our readings that led into specific questions about the text. When my students asked for more guidance at the beginning of unit two, I flipped the order so that now I begin with guided questions and then let the course flow into conversation from there.

Decorum

In The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power Lacan compares analysts to educators by saying that for a psychoanalyst to avoid counter-transference, she must use the techniques that educators have used since time immemorial. I learned from my writing center experience that those techniques are the ones needed for the basic decorum an instructor should have when engaging with students. This decorum includes an openness and eagerness to listen to students, a desire to make the space more about the students interests while also guiding them, and a savviness at knowing how to navigate the push and pull of teacher-student interactions. I believe that teaching is both a selfish and selfless act: a class comes from what an instructor intends to teach, but one should intend to teach what they most want to share.