Teaching Philosophy, Methodology & Goals

Philosophy:

I teach a required Freshman writing course, and semester after semester, many students come into class referring to themselves as “bad writers” or “bad at English.” It’s no exaggeration to say that for many students, the task of writing is painful. To these students, Freshman Comp seems like a hoop they need to jump through, never to use again. At the heart of this, for many students, is a deeply vested belief that nobody will care what they have to say.

I have many goals as a writing instructor: that my students learn to read with a more critical eye, that they understand the basics of research, but my biggest goal is that they begin to believe that writing in general, and their writing in particular  matters.  I want them to leave my course trusting their written voice a bit more than when they came in. I want them to be curious about the subjects that interest them, as well as in the process of learning.

So how do I promote curiosity in my classroom? First of all, by asking questions, not just about the texts we read but also about the learning process. For example, whenever my students tell me they found a reading boring, I ask them why. I write their reported reasons for boredom on the chalkboard, and as a class we assess whether the problem can be solved easily, for example with a snack or a break, or if the boredom arises from an emotional response to the text itself. Often, we find the student feels excluded from the text’s audience. We might talk about why, what the student (or the author) could do to invite more readers in. The trick here is, by the end of the discussion, we’ve had a long talk about writing, and about the text itself.

I believe in a curriculum of “supported autonomy.” In other words, I want students to follow their own curiosity, but I don’t want to leave them without any guidance. Clearly, for example, if you tell students they can “write a paper about anything you want,” most will be overwhelmed with choices. This is why, in my Composition 1 course, in which the research topic is open-ended, we spend almost two weeks developing questions for their research projects. I ask them what they google in their spare time; I ask them what they wish they’d learned in high school; I ask them what they were curious about as children and what happened to that curiosity (did it deepen or did it disappear?) When they decide on a topic that interests them, we work together to narrow that topic into a salient research question: what do they know about it now? What more do they want to know? Through this process, students have written about why victims frequently return to their abusers; the effects of child stardom on adult development; how the history of the New York subway system affects its operations today, and why the United States has struggled to break out of the two-party political system. With this, as with all of my assignments, the hope is that at a certain point, “supported autonomy” simply becomes “autonomy” and the student leaves the class a little more curious and a little more inclined to investigate that curiosity.

Methodology

My Ph.D. is in literacy pedagogy and my research deals mostly with issues of affective barriers to learning. That is to say, I’ve spent decades studying student engagement—and the lack thereof. I bring that research into my curriculum design and my classroom interactions daily. In my Composition Studies article: “How Am I Supposed to Watch a Little Piece of Paper? Literacy and Learning Under Duress”, I argue that to create equitable curricula that engage the majority of our students, we need to think about the additional cognitive burdens duress places on students and design our assignments accordingly.  This kind of curriculum follows the principles of Universal Design, in that it includes students distracted by duress and trauma as well as  (not at the expense of) students who are not under duress.

I design all curricula with the three following principles in mind:

• • • Both professors and students should work toward an understanding of the complexities of attention and learning. We can’t just tell our students (or ourselves) to “pay attention” and expect that to stick. Research on attention shows us that attention is not obedient. That said, we can teach students to notice how their attention works and why it falters. With this in mind, each semester, I have my students write a “difficulty paper” (designed by Mariolina Salvatori). Students describe their experience of reading a text: where did they get confused, bored or distracted. Why? In class, we discuss solutions to these problems, where pertinent, and each student develops a focused question for rereading. They then write another short paper on what they learned from rereading.

I have also developed and supervised multiple resources for self-awareness of attention and emotion, including The Procrastination Station, a website that helps students identify their own antecedents to procrastination and plagiarism and gives them strategies to move forward.

• • • Students learn well when they “find a foothold” that connects the curriculum to their own personal interests and goals. Research on learning shows us that students learn better when the assignment is of personal significance. Students can begin with tasks they’re good at or topics they care about, and, from there, build toward the more uncomfortable sites of uncertainty in their writing. This is why I designed an assignment for the Composition 2 model course called “Portrait of a Word,” in which students write about the importance of a particular word or phrase specific to their own community. This allows us to have conversations about writing for (or speaking to) a particular audience and the linguistic expectations of different situations.

I also developed a beginning-of-term survey, based on the “Utility Value Intervention” research of Hulleman and Harackiewicz, which asks students to reflect on their future goals, and how the course will help them achieve these goals. Originally, I used this survey in my own courses, but we have since expanded it for use in multiple sections of Composition 1 and 2 at City Tech. Use of this survey has increased retention in those sections between 11-14.7%

• • • In order for students to pay attention, they must be paid attention to. This requires us, as professors, to assume our students are making meaning in their writing, even if we struggle to find that meaning. In other words, we respond to student writing as readers – noting where we became confused or distracted, much as we might when reading published articles.

The most notable example of this in my own classroom was when, for an assignment that asked students to describe an historical event and discuss why it was important for young people today to know about it, a student turned in a paper about the movie Scarface. Though the essay began with a few sentences describing the history of the Cuban embargo, it was difficult to figure out how the paper related to the prompt; it read like an off-the-top-of-his-head synopsis of the movie. But instead of berating him for not doing the assignment correctly, I asked him why he wanted to write about Scarface.He answered quietly, but matter-of-factly: “My uncle always told me that when he went out, he wanted to go out like Scarface, and he did. He got gunned down that same way.” Because it was a major news story at the time it happened, we decided that if he wanted to, Victor could write about his uncle’s murder. He turned in the most beautiful, lyrical, heartbreaking, sophisticated essay I have ever received.  I write about it in my Composition Studies article. If I had approached Victor with disappointment and not curiosity, I would never have had the chance to hear his story.

Future Teaching Plans:

I plan to continue developing more research-based resources for engagement both for my own classroom and the department-at-large. I hope to branch out from teaching mainstream composition into teaching the co-requisite composition course, where issues of engagement appear to be even more pressing. I also intend to continue teaching creative writing, which I did for the first time at City Tech last spring. I love the freedom and fun of that course, and hope to bring more of that spirit back into the composition classroom.