Teaching Philosophy
In her essay collection The Death of Adam, Marilynne Robinson writes, “I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe that there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.” Robinson’s strategy to do so is to study history; my method is to teach. I am consistently amazed at the complex and compassionate work that students produce, and facilitating that work helps me feel, if not like a scheming genius myself, at least in collaboration with one.
This collaboration begins by making sure my students know that my commitment to teaching transcends both the physical space of the classroom and the duration of the course. I encourage students to come to me with everything from paper drafts to academic advice to résumés and cover letters to philosophical questions. I enthusiastically celebrate particularly perceptive student comments and relay to them my own genuine excitement for a class’s possibilities. When they see that the course is not marginal to my professional life but in fact critical (and exhilarating!) to me, they are able to let the course occupy a larger space in their lives. They engage more with one another during class, ask me to recommend books that aren't on the syllabus, and attend office hours more frequently. They feel freer to bring outside texts and ideas to class—and, most importantly, to take the class with them when they leave.
Incorporating relevant parts of my professional interests in rhetoric and composition helps me generate these moments and position student discussions as parts of larger discourses. As an instructor of both literature and rhetoric classes, I believe in encouraging what can often seem like two distinct pedagogies to inflect one another. Teaching literature classes rhetorically means abandoning the question of “meaning,” which can often feel like a pointless decoding game, in favor of the question of rhetorical force: what does this text do, rather than what does it mean? What does it produce and enable in the world? In teaching composition classes literarily, I remind my students that every act of reading and writing is fundamentally aesthetic. An argument’s content is inseparable from its contours, from its shape and form and literary effect, and understanding this allows students to produce more interesting writing and more robust arguments.
Successful collaboration also proceeds from a profound understanding of student heterogeneity. From the high-school stars who come to college deeply confident in their expressive abilities to those whose backgrounds in writing have left them feeling dread—or indifference—as they receive a writing prompt, I focus on meeting these distinct needs, and view the range, not as a hindrance to class management, but as a potentially enriching diversity. When teaching two sections of the same course one spring, I found that, though the course content, semester, and class sizes of each section were identical—they were even scheduled back-to-back—each required a fully unique lesson plan, including different texts, modified assignments, and distinct approaches to encouraging student engagement. I work to find the best teaching methods that suit the course dynamic: Though one course thrives on discussions, another might respond best to traditional lectures, group work, or even community-based learning.
Regardless of the dynamic, however, I emphasize the real-world contexts for writing assignments and reading. The essays we write in class are not crafted in a vacuum: I encourage students to consider audience, to determine an exigence for writing, and to alter genre and form in the service of purpose. For instance, for an assignment on evaluation, students write orthodox academic essays rhetorically assessing a contemporary text. Then we discuss the conventions and tone of online consumer reviews, and I ask them to rewrite the essay and post it on Amazon.com or another user-driven site. The goal is to shift students’ perceptions away from the idea that an essay is a readerless text whose value is determined by a list of syllabus-listed requirements, and towards the notion that a successful essay is writing that can accomplish something. Students reframe their work as creative problem-solving and purposeful expression, and the shift simultaneously helps alleviate the anxiety that writing can inspire.
Successful writing also proceeds from strong reading skills, and students in my courses read many texts from many different sources. Reading homework for a lesson on memory might include excerpts from Brian Greene’s string-theory text The Elegant Universe; Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking; and poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. For a lesson on definition, students might read “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” the New York Times Magazine article by Jose Antonio Vargas; George Orwell’s “Politics of the English Language”; and selections from federal laws like IIRAIRA and the DREAM Act. These readings are augmented by multimedia texts such as video and podcasts, which I link to the readings as well as to broader conversations about rhetoric and purpose. For some assignments, I ask students to provide their own multimedia elements, such as an essay submitted both as a written text and reimagined as a three-minute podcast.
Ultimately, I want students to see the real world in the writing classroom, and to see their writing in the real world. My students have worked with local businesses and community groups, written letters to politicians and administrators, and composed cover letters, Yelp posts, email correspondence, and film reviews in addition to conventional academic writing. I teach through the observation articulated by David Bartholomae: that all writers, “in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being ‘insiders’—that is, of being both inside an established and powerful discourse, and of being granted a special right to speak.”
This collaboration begins by making sure my students know that my commitment to teaching transcends both the physical space of the classroom and the duration of the course. I encourage students to come to me with everything from paper drafts to academic advice to résumés and cover letters to philosophical questions. I enthusiastically celebrate particularly perceptive student comments and relay to them my own genuine excitement for a class’s possibilities. When they see that the course is not marginal to my professional life but in fact critical (and exhilarating!) to me, they are able to let the course occupy a larger space in their lives. They engage more with one another during class, ask me to recommend books that aren't on the syllabus, and attend office hours more frequently. They feel freer to bring outside texts and ideas to class—and, most importantly, to take the class with them when they leave.
Incorporating relevant parts of my professional interests in rhetoric and composition helps me generate these moments and position student discussions as parts of larger discourses. As an instructor of both literature and rhetoric classes, I believe in encouraging what can often seem like two distinct pedagogies to inflect one another. Teaching literature classes rhetorically means abandoning the question of “meaning,” which can often feel like a pointless decoding game, in favor of the question of rhetorical force: what does this text do, rather than what does it mean? What does it produce and enable in the world? In teaching composition classes literarily, I remind my students that every act of reading and writing is fundamentally aesthetic. An argument’s content is inseparable from its contours, from its shape and form and literary effect, and understanding this allows students to produce more interesting writing and more robust arguments.
Successful collaboration also proceeds from a profound understanding of student heterogeneity. From the high-school stars who come to college deeply confident in their expressive abilities to those whose backgrounds in writing have left them feeling dread—or indifference—as they receive a writing prompt, I focus on meeting these distinct needs, and view the range, not as a hindrance to class management, but as a potentially enriching diversity. When teaching two sections of the same course one spring, I found that, though the course content, semester, and class sizes of each section were identical—they were even scheduled back-to-back—each required a fully unique lesson plan, including different texts, modified assignments, and distinct approaches to encouraging student engagement. I work to find the best teaching methods that suit the course dynamic: Though one course thrives on discussions, another might respond best to traditional lectures, group work, or even community-based learning.
Regardless of the dynamic, however, I emphasize the real-world contexts for writing assignments and reading. The essays we write in class are not crafted in a vacuum: I encourage students to consider audience, to determine an exigence for writing, and to alter genre and form in the service of purpose. For instance, for an assignment on evaluation, students write orthodox academic essays rhetorically assessing a contemporary text. Then we discuss the conventions and tone of online consumer reviews, and I ask them to rewrite the essay and post it on Amazon.com or another user-driven site. The goal is to shift students’ perceptions away from the idea that an essay is a readerless text whose value is determined by a list of syllabus-listed requirements, and towards the notion that a successful essay is writing that can accomplish something. Students reframe their work as creative problem-solving and purposeful expression, and the shift simultaneously helps alleviate the anxiety that writing can inspire.
Successful writing also proceeds from strong reading skills, and students in my courses read many texts from many different sources. Reading homework for a lesson on memory might include excerpts from Brian Greene’s string-theory text The Elegant Universe; Joan Didion’s memoir The Year of Magical Thinking; and poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke. For a lesson on definition, students might read “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” the New York Times Magazine article by Jose Antonio Vargas; George Orwell’s “Politics of the English Language”; and selections from federal laws like IIRAIRA and the DREAM Act. These readings are augmented by multimedia texts such as video and podcasts, which I link to the readings as well as to broader conversations about rhetoric and purpose. For some assignments, I ask students to provide their own multimedia elements, such as an essay submitted both as a written text and reimagined as a three-minute podcast.
Ultimately, I want students to see the real world in the writing classroom, and to see their writing in the real world. My students have worked with local businesses and community groups, written letters to politicians and administrators, and composed cover letters, Yelp posts, email correspondence, and film reviews in addition to conventional academic writing. I teach through the observation articulated by David Bartholomae: that all writers, “in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being ‘insiders’—that is, of being both inside an established and powerful discourse, and of being granted a special right to speak.”