Philosophy

As a teacher, my approach is entirely focused on my students and helping them to succeed in achieving their personal, academic, and professional goals. Therefore my teaching philosophy hinges on seeing each student as an individual. No matter what type of English course I teach, by investing myself in each student’s personal interests and goals, my student-centered approach not only gives students a solid foundation in the basics of effective composition, creative writing, and critical reading, but also stresses the need to go beyond the basics. My primary goal, encompassing all aspects of my teaching philosophy, is to help my students to find their voice.

Personalized attention is therefore a cornerstone of my teaching style. I ask that all of my students meet with me throughout the semester to gauge their progress, gather feedback on their experiences with the course and the material, and discuss how they can apply what they learn in my class to their own interests and goals. I firmly believe that a student will gain no lasting knowledge from courses that have no direct applicability to his or her life and interests, so I take every course section as an opportunity to refocus the material to cater to the specific needs of my students. I therefore stress relatability in my courses—both of the material and of myself as an instructor. In order to encourage students to be open to my strong emphasis on one-on-one attention, I believe in the importance of a comfortable and engaging classroom environment. This requires that my students are also comfortable with me as an instructor, and I therefore maintain a more or less casual atmosphere in my classes, drawing on my own personal experiences as examples of how the course material can be relevant to one’s own life. In addition, I encourage students to take every assignment as an opportunity to further explore their own interests, never imposing narrow or specific topics on their writing, projects, or research, but instead highlighting how they can apply concepts learned in class to their own chosen areas of focus. Through personal attention, stressing the applicability of course content to real-life situations, and encouraging students to explore their own interests in their coursework, my courses offer students valuable tools in working towards finding their voice.

This ability to apply course material to real-life situations is especially important to college students today, as their education must effectively prepare them for their future professions. Especially in the ever-growing context of media proliferation in the digital age, students must be able to apply what they learn to a multitude of media formats. It is for this reason that I have oriented much of my own research around new media and popular culture studies, thereby allowing me to offer my students a variety of teaching approaches and methodologies directly relevant to their position as future professionals in the increasingly technology-oriented modern workplace. I therefore extend course content and assignments beyond the traditional, emphasizing digital and multi-modal forms of composition, creative writing for new media forms, and critical reading of visual and digital as well as literary texts. Through offering my students the opportunity to complete digital projects as opposed to more traditional academic assignments, they are given hands-on experience with technologies that will be useful in their future careers. As they find their voice, I therefore help my students to also learn to adapt that voice to different professional situations directly relevant to their current digital context.

Active participation and lively discussion are also key elements of my classroom environment, yet they are some of the more difficult behaviors to evoke from students. Through testing various approaches, I have developed specific methods of promoting student involvement in class and active engagement with course material. First, I draw on the Socratic Method, acting primarily as a questioner rather than a lecturer. Through asking productive questions and ensuring that all voices are heard, I stimulate and guide organic discussion among students. Second, in both writing and reading courses, I assign thought-provoking texts and encourage students to express their opinions on and reactions to the material. In particular, at every class meeting I ask my students to reflect on whether or not they agree with the texts they read and to defend their reasoning, fostering a critical approach to reading that is surprisingly novel to most college students. My third method, directly related to the second, entails encouraging each student to select one reading throughout the semester that especially interests them and lead the class in discussing it, primarily through generating productive questions to ask their fellow students. This type of discussion among peers gives students the opportunity to express their own opinions and nuance their argumentative style, refining their ability to express themselves and thereby helping them to continue the process of finding their voice.

Another key aspect of helping students to find their individual voices entails a consideration of the diversity of perspectives present in the classroom. I am keenly aware of the great amount of diversity among my students in terms of backgrounds and skills, but also in terms of points of view, interests, goals. I encourage students to acknowledge their differences of opinion, but also to embrace these differences as productive motivators to nuance and strengthen one’s own arguments. By teaching my students to recognize the validity of diverse points of view, I demonstrate the value of objective, systematic reasoning. In addition, my students are taught sensitivity to and acceptance of perspectives differing from their own, preparing them not only for a diverse workplace, but for the diversity experienced every day in our cosmopolitan context. This allows them to temper their arguments through both logic and empathy, giving their new-found voice the ability to be persuasive as well as understanding.

All of these methods promote one fundamental skill required to find one’s voice: critical thinking. One cannot communicate persuasively, effectively express oneself, or read effectively without the capacity for critical thinking. Through encouraging my students to question everything they read, approaching texts of all kinds as texts to be analyzed rather than blindly accepted, they learn the fundamentals of effective expression and communication. I demonstrate to my students the need to be able to detect the weaknesses in an argument, teaching them the value of logic, cogency, and thoroughness in both expressing one’s ideas and in analyzing someone else’s. In this way, this final element of critical thinking solidifies my students’ discovery of their own voices.

I therefore evaluate my students not only on their knowledge of and ability to emulate the concepts and methods taught in class, but also on their ability to go beyond the basics. Namely, I examine their progress throughout the semester in terms of their engagement with the course material, their ability to apply it to their own interests and goals, their participation in discussion, their development of cogent arguments that take into account all sides of an issue, and their capacity for critical thinking. My methods directly reflect my student-centered teaching philosophy; by encouraging student growth in these areas through personal attention, an interactive format, and an analytical approach, my students get excited about their education and gain valuable experience for their future careers. When students complete a course with me, they are more confident in their abilities to communicate persuasively, express their creativity, and read critically. In short: they find their voice.