Teaching Philosophy

All teaching involves three elements: the student, the material, and the teacher. The teacher serves as a conduit between the material and the student, facilitating learning. While teachers often focus on knowing the material in great detail, my 23 years in education have taught me that knowing the student well is equally—if not more—important. All students bring with them knowledge and experiences that the classroom material will build on and reshape. Good teachers help students make a connection to materials, but excellent teachers also actively help students go beyond connection to transform knowledge as well. This basic understanding of teaching has helped me to form a set of values that informs all teaching I do—from first-year composition through doctoral seminars. Central to these teaching values is one basic truth: Students themselves are at the heart of all learning.

All student experiences are important. The first value that informs my teaching comes from a notion that students come into our classes not as blank slates but as complex individuals with ideas, experiences, and capabilities that influence how they learn. A single class often has students who have had wildly different learning experiences, who use different languages and language varieties, and who have different dispositions toward learning, school, and teachers. All of the experiences that students bring with them are meaningful and important for two reasons: student disposition and scaffolding support. Student disposition is vitally important to learning. If a student doesn’t feel that the teacher has their best interests at heart or doesn’t value them as a student, they’re much less likely to internalize what they’ve learned and to use it in new situations. Instead, the learning will stay in the classroom. Understanding students is equally important for providing scaffolding. If we seek to build a house, but we don’t know where the foundation will be laid, the house can never be solidly built. When we know our students’ backgrounds and experiences, we can help them find what they already know, and we can work with them to build on that knowledge. We can help our students take what they learn, replace what isn’t helping, and expand on what is. We help the students themselves become their own best teachers.

If we want to know where our students are going, we need to know where they’ve been. By valuing student experiences, we build on what students know instead of ignoring it or trying to overwrite it. For example, I regularly teach a practicum for new graduate teaching assistants who are teaching first-year composition at my university for the first time. In that class, there are students coming right out of undergraduate and students coming in with master’s degrees and many years of teaching under their belts. Some of them have taught in high schools, taught literature, or taught ESL. Some of them are domestic students, and some are international. Each of these experiences influences how they approach the class, approach me, approach teaching, and approach composition theory. Sometimes long-held ideas get in the way of teaching; sometimes they enhance it. Many times, what I learn about my students’ experiences helps me see teaching in a new way as well. All of these experiences are important for me to understand and support these students well.

All teaching is a rhetorical act. This second teaching value is intimately tied to the first. Teachers must remember that we are not bankers who can make deposits of knowledge into our students’ heads. Instead, teachers are rhetoricians who must actively work to convince students that what we are teaching has value to them and can be used in contexts beyond the class. If a student does not believe that what they’re learning matters, they’re not likely to use that learning. To demonstrate the value of learning to students, teachers must help students connect knowledge acquired in class to their personal lives, their jobs, their research, their teaching, and other situations outside of four walls of the classroom.

In my first-year composition classes, I often ask students to do this directly: How would you use what we’ve learned today on social media? How would it apply to writing in your major? How might this one day apply to your job? Critical reflection on learning and application can help students to use what they’ve learned outside of class. This same notion holds true in graduate classes as well. Theory can’t stay theory. It’s important to ask students to apply what they’ve learned to their own teaching and research. Teachers must actively convince students that what they’re learning can be reapplied, and teachers must show students how to do that reapplication.

All learning involves adaptation. The notion of reapplication brings us to my final teaching value. It’s important to remember as teachers that all learning involves adaptation of knowledge. Rarely are learners placed in a situation in which what they learned will be applied exactly as they have learned it. Instead, the knowledge must be reshaped to fit the new situation. This is especially true for writing. For example, a writing teacher may teach a student about a thesis statement, but rarely are thesis statements as straightforward as they are in writing classes. A thesis statement may be called by another name, such as a central claim, a research statement, or a hypothesis. It may also not show up as a single statement at all but may instead be a paragraph, a subject line, or even a chart or graph. This is why it’s so important to show students that “rules” to writing are not unchanging and monolithic but instead are flexible and adaptive. One method of writing may be reapplied differently across many different writing contexts, and it’s important for students to learn how to effectively engage in that adaptation.

Like with the other two values above, adaptation also applies to teaching situations from first-year composition to dissertating doctoral students. A first-year undergraduate student will learn more from understanding the theory of citation than from learning a specific citation style. A doctoral student will learn more from understanding the rhetorical value of a literature review than they will from simply recreating one. The importance of learning is not in memorizing rules and standards but instead is in creating flexible and adaptive understanding.

Students are at the heart of all learning. By this I mean that my role as a teacher is not to be an arbiter of knowledge; it is to be a facilitator of it. I should understand my students’ lived experiences to help them build upon them. I should convince students that what they’re learning is valuable and can be reapplied outside of the classroom. And I should help students to actively make those adaptations so the knowledge can be reapplied. My role is not to impart knowledge on students but is to encourage students to come to their own understandings.