Teaching Philosophy/ Statement of Teaching

Teaching Philosophy (what a difficult genre. Is there a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Teaching Philosophy Composing?  Anyway, this is an evolving document -- and will always be so.  Aw, heck.  Here it is.  I welcome any feedback on this draft. Please keep in mind that this is a general statement I wrote for my prelims portfolio.)

Much of my motivation as a teacher and researcher of writing has been a result of my successes and failures as a writer.  I struggled as a writer in my first English literature courses while I excelled in creative writing; this disparity in experiences is where my interests in Composition Studies began.  Why was I succeeding as a writer in one situation but failing in another?  The answer was that I wasn’t aware of the conventions used to write about literature; I didn’t read literary criticism; and I certainly hadn’t interacted with literary studies insiders.  I needed an awareness of how to meet the demands of this particular situation.  I needed to know how one thought, spoke, wrote about literature and participated within this community.  During this experience I saw my previous undergraduate work as a visual artist and filmmaker in a similar light.  Working with different technologies, media, and genres required learning the technical skills and conventions of discourse within a community of producers.  My goal has been, and continues to be, then, for my students to learn about how technology (and Dennis Baron reminds us that even pencils are a technology) shapes and is shaped by culture; how to work with a variety of semiotic resources; and the skills that potentially lead to academic and professional success as well as participation in culture.

When it came to my students’ success in a required course such as first-year composition, how could I construct opportunities for students to write within discourse communities?  My first answers are found in my MA thesis on academic service-learning (AS-L) in first-year composition.  In these courses, my students chose to work with one of roughly a dozen non-profit community agencies and organizations.  I hoped that juxtaposing the writing they did in our course with the writing they did for the nonprofits would help them see how writing was organized and valued within particular communities and acquire meta-level knowledge of the writing they did in other courses and circumstances. 

This interest in social spaces of writing that are located outside school fits well with my interests in the ways emerging technology are allowing people to connect and work with one another; that is, we are moving from early descriptions of Internet users as “isolates” to today’s “netizens.”  Technology mediates more and more of our daily lives in ways that allow people to share and co-construct knowledge as members of interest groups as well as across cultural, racial, gender, political and economic boundaries.  Examining our relationships with and uses of technology and media is possibly more important than ever before, and by incorporating new media assignments into my teaching of English 100 and English 201, students had the opportunity to not just analyze and interact with texts composed with a variety of media and within a variety of communities but actually produce their own new media texts and reflect on how they define writing by juxtaposing the texts produced in their school and media-rich lives. For example, my Wikipedia assignment (see Teaching section of portfolio) students learned the technical skills that enable them to contribute to this site, but they also learned the processes through which the community(ies) interacts and collaborates to construct knowledge and define special interest groups.

When I began teaching I solely focused on the technical skills I thought students needed, and although that concern has never disappeared, I’ve continued to augment my pedagogy with considerations of writing as a social skill -- as a way of participating in and shaping culture.