Teaching Philosophy
REVISED: 15 Oct, 2006
The following teaching philosophy explains what I think learning is, the
general goals I encourage in a typical composition course, some of the
pedagogical structures I incorporate into my courses, and how my courses
assess learning and writing.
What Learning Is
In the most general sense, learning happens when people encounter the
Other, the unknown, the foreign, the confusing, the new. It happens when
we are able to step outside of ourselves, even if only for a moment, to
glimpse possibilities that not only change the way we think and see things,
but reveal to us how we have thought and seen the things we have. Learning
is when we engage in our and other's dispositions about things and ask
questions like "why," "for what purpose," and "who
benefits." Learning, especially in the writing classroom, is when
the leaner confronts her epistemologies and discursive practices as such.
The best learning, however, is not necessarily when everyone agrees,
gets along, and feels good about the interactions that occur. The best
learning, critical learning, happens when we encounter conflict about
knowledge and meaning that produces a need to negotiate concerns and values.
Self-conscious and critical learning in the composition classroom,
then, means students understand how communities assess knowledge and discourse
and make valid conclusions about the world and the forces in it.
What Goals I Encourage
I typically incorporate in composition courses three key rhetorical practices:
- to engage students with rhetoric as a social and epistemological process and as articulations of dispositions that allow us to make sense of our world, for instance, considering how the sophistic notions of nomos (social conventions and norms) and kairos (consideration of opposing views and contextual factors) structure the nature and limits of discourse/knowledge;
- to explicitly reflect upon how rhetoric and learning are a social assessment process, a process of "measuring" in the Protagorean sense, which also asks students to consider how knowledge is constructed and validated in communities by certain perspectives and commonly held dispositions that predispose us to judge in determined ways; and
- to explore with students rhetoric and literacy as a political process of citizen formation, considering in particular power dynamics and the ways knowledge/power (in the Foucauldian sense) is constructed by "regimes of truth," dispositions that should be interrogated as both social and epistemological/rhetorical structures with material effects on worldly agents.
How I Design Courses
To accomplish these goals, I ask students periodically (in a variety of
ways) to reflect upon rhetoric’s relationship to agency, citizenship,
common sense, choice/desire, and logic. We co-construct together assessment
rubrics, assignment criteria, class activities, and reflection/writing
prompts. When we write, we simultaneously consider how that writing will/should
be assessed, what purposes and expectations we should have for each other,
and how we'll identify performances that meet or exceed expectations.
Group activities are crucial to forming agreement in these matters, and
my mediating disagreement, even encouraging it at times, is vital to students
making sense of our activities and complicating their own dispositions
about writing and knowledge. In all my courses, writing, reflection, and
the assessment of writing are all integrated to create a space for democratic
participation and student praxis.
How I Construct Assessment
At various stages of each assignment, I structure assessment activities
that allow students to assess each others’ performances, reflect
upon how they've made judgments and why, and revise those performances
and judgments. Ultimately, these activities ask students to produce praxis
for future writing endeavors by confronting multiple judgments of their
writing, as well as their own evolving judgments. We discuss assessment,
then, as a discourse that helps us make decisions about whether we’ve
met our goals in the course, and articulate and interrogate the epistemologies
and hermeneutic practices that produce value in/through writing.
I design assessment and writing activities in most of my courses to:
- create writing and assessment practices that are unitary, social processes;
- encourage students to build authority and community through collaborative
activities;
- encourage students to embrace conflict and difference by continually
situating knowledge and searching for the softer and absent voices in
discussions;
- demand that students reflect periodically on their practices; and
- ask about the relationship of knowledge, power, and citizenship in
the rhetoric at hand.
The products of the above design components offer a map that we use to measure
their performance over a semester, usually in portfolios. At the end of
the semester, I conference with each student over their portfolios. We
make decisions together about their course grades by looking at the landscape
of evaluations on their portfolios that we've collected (typically, a
set of colleague/peer evaluations, a self-evaluation, and an evaluation
by me). Our decisions are made easier by the use of a grading contract
that essentially allows us to make only one grading distinction: that
of an A or B (unless the student has not met the contract). Allowing students
to be an integral part of all aspects of assessment and grading in my
classes provides them with much needed power and agency in their education.
It also allows them to reflect more powerfully, and revise their writing
by making tough decisions as writers and learners. It asks them to consider
a larger group of dispositions and values from which their writing and
its assessment comes. They can no longer give me what they think "I
want." They must approach their learning and writing as a set of
critical decisions, made self-consciously and reflectively.
In short, each student’s learning is assessed in a rich, complex,
and longitudinal way, one in which the student takes control. In this
way, the processes and discourses of assessment in my courses are a synecdoche
for learning generally, and learning to become more effective writer-citizens
specifically.
For more details about these last five components, follow the links below:
