Teaching Philosophy
My personal concept of teaching is rooted in ideas about writing, specifically how writing can shape both my students and their communities. Teaching composition is about helping my students communicate their ideas with an increasingly digital and multimodal world in a way that makes them feel heard. I wish to teach in a manner that is engaging and interactive with students and to create a classroom environment that is open and inviting.
Teaching is investing in and engaging with my students so that they can take what they have learned and apply it in other contexts. The purpose of composition is to help others better understand themselves and their roles as different kinds of writers. As teachers, we have an obligation to get our students thinking in ways that not only benefit themselves but our society as well. My main reason for wanting to teach writing is that I want my students to be able to better communicate their ideas with the world, and in turn, I want the world to be able to understand and apply what my students have to say. In order to do this, I try to emphasize the importance of understanding the many different genres of writing to my students. It is particularly important that they understand how to draft and write multimodal texts, as the world becomes more digital, this is often the most common way my students’ writing will be seen in the future. In both ENGL 1100 and ENGL 1120 I repurposed the final assignment in order to make the assigned writing more multimodal to give my students practice. In ENGL 1100, my students were asked to take their more academic conversation from their final paper and turn it into a social media post. In ENGL 1120, I am asking my students to create an ePortfolio that transforms their academic work into a professional portfolio that speaks to the field they intend to enter and who they think they are as both an academic and a professional. It is a goal of mine as an instructor to have my students be able to express their own ideas instead of regurgitating my own. By having my students talk about their interests in a certain text or a piece of their own writing, I allow them to express their ideas, while also gaining some insight into how they are interpreting certain genres.
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Student motivation is one of the most important things that is often not thought about when it comes to education. Teaching, as I’ve discussed above, is not a one-way delivery of information, but a collaboration between myself and all the students in the classroom. The best way to motivate students is to help them generate ideas for their assignments and always offer my assistance, but at the same time, to give them some room to be creative and collaborative with each other. Chances are if the student really cares about a topic, they are more likely to be motivated to complete their work and participate in class. Making the class relatable and engaging for my students is one of my top priorities and allows students to better communicate their ideas to a real audience, one that they will eventually have a chance to communicate with, especially in the case of my final assignment for ENGL 1120.
My philosophy has been influenced by professors I have had both the pleasure of learning under, but also from those whose teaching styles did not mesh well with my personal learning style. I feel that I learn the most about pedagogy when I do not agree with or engage effectively with the way a professor is instructing a class. This allows me to question the way that I wish to teach and has made me a more collaborative and open teacher. As a student, I did not always engage with the way all of my professors taught, especially those who were not open to collaboration with students or multimodal practices of writing. As a student I always want a teacher who I feel comfortable asking questions to and who encourages discussion, so that is the kind of instructor I will attempt to emulate in my own teaching style.
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Something that was a big turning point for me in my undergraduate degree was actually understanding what learning is. I finally understood this idea that learning is not a teacher spoon-feeding their student information for them to regurgitate. Learning is a teacher giving a student an exercise, having them try their hand at something, failing, trying again, and succeeding. It also involves being able to write for a potentially real audience, not just the instructor. I didn’t realize how much learning was actually about trying out new genres, accepting failure, and growing from that. I want my students to know that not understanding something and being confused is a part of the process of learning. Being confused can be good because it means you’re really thinking hard about complex topics. Some of the most effective methods for learning involve the students discussing or writing amongst themselves, without interruption from the instructor at first. When students first get a chance to try out new genres without consequences, the results are often better than you might think.
I do hope to be teaching composition and other genres of writing well into my future. Engaging with students has been one of my favorite experiences, not only as an instructor of record, but also when I was a writing center tutor. Working with students is a very rewarding experience that takes a lot of thought about what kind of environment you want to create, and hopefully, you can tell, I have hopes that I will continue creating open and inviting spaces for my students to practice their new and old writing skills in.
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