Teaching philosophy

(This page on my website is under revision, and it always should be.)

I would distill my teaching philosophy into these three ideas: communal inquiry, transparency in assessment and instruction, and inclusivity of dialogue and practice.

My approach to writing pedagogy is influenced by my 5 years of experience as an ESL instructor and my academic background in linguistics and language acquisition. I value meta-linguistic grammar instruction in moderation as well as critical study of rhetorical forms and tropes. I believe there are multiple valid approaches to writing pedagogy, but I favor those that present writing as an iterative process. I thus favor project or portfolio style assessments that prioritize the discrete stages of organizing ideas, creating drafts, and editing. In order to encourage students to incorporate instructor feedback into their writing process, I also allow students to improve some grades by revising and resubmitting assignments.

Although it might sound odd to phrase it this way in an academic context, I think that an awareness of genre is one of the greatest tools that an academic can bring to analytical writing. For students whose aim is eventually to publish research, I think that studying the stylistic features of actual current journal articles (book reviews, lab reports, encyclopedia entries, theory papers, position papers, etc) is indispensable. While there may be some benefit to teaching abstract global "writing strategies," I tend to see these as more of the result of learning to write than the method.

I place a high value on transparency. It is important to me that students understand what is expected of them and, more pointedly, the purpose of each assessment tool. One of my priorities is to make sure that assessments, especially final exams, hew as closely as possible to student learning objectives as elaborated in the syllabus. Students should be able to see a clear, intuitive link between major assessments and the overall goals of the class.

I believe that a good pedagogy is always a reflective one. I hope never to start a new semester without improving my teaching strategies based on student feedback, new research, or classroom technologies. In Fall 2020 while teaching a remote composition and literature course at Carthage College, I made LMS discussion board posts a major area of instruction and assessment. One of my goals in the upcoming year is to incorporate corpus linguistics research tools into the writing classroom. Linguistic corpora are large structured databases of text used to make generalizations about language use. With a little training students can be taught to use corpora to make their own discoveries about, for instance, changes in the grammatical and stylistic characteristics of academic writing over time, or structural differences between spoken and written English. A teaching strategy like this puts the student in charge of their own course of inquiry, and frames academic writing not as a set of ossified rules and conventions, but as a living dialect that can be understood through empirical study.

The educational setting that is most familiar to me is one in which most students have different ages, first languages, and religious beliefs. I see it as the teacher's responsibility to help all students to feel safe and included, making mutual respect the foundation of authentic exchanges of ideas.