Below is the teaching statement I’ve been sending out when I apply for non-adjunct teaching jobs:

As a teacher, I try to demystify the process of making meaning from difficult texts for students. I begin the semester with texts they find familiar in some way because I want students to feel comfortable even while they are being challenged. I make close reading fun and use scaffolding to make assignments manageable. These methods make texts seem relatable and give students a clear grasp of the interpretive and argumentative processes.

At Hunter College, a senior college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, I have frequently taught “Introduction to Writing about Literature,” a general-education course that teaches freshmen how to interpret and write analytical essays about prose fiction, Shakespearean drama, and poetry. We begin the semester with outwardly familiar texts so that students feel comfortable as interpretive challenges increase. For instance, students find A Raisin in the Sun accessible because its setting in an urban apartment is recognizably real to them. Many students have read Lorraine Hansberry’s play in high school, so their prior knowledge of the play reassures them they’re on solid footing in the class. Students learn the value of thorough and close (re)reading as we examine debates and tensions within the text (Afrocentrism versus black assimilation, for example) on which the text can be convincingly read as taking opposite stances. We talk about how the play can be staged different ways to make various characters appear more or less sympathetic, and how tracing where the text’s sympathies lie is key to discerning its meaning. With this interpretive practice, students understand that, while not a hard science, literary analysis permits any reading that students can support with logical analysis of textual evidence—that is, that all claims about a text must begin with evidence. Seminar-style class discussion in a mix of small groups and the full class helps to focus students and show them that they have the skills to make meaning from dense texts both in conversation and in writing. After students write argumentative interpretive essays about more familiar texts like A Raisin in the Sun or Othello, they have gained the practice to give them the confidence, patience, and interpretive scrutiny to make sense of texts whose styles may feel more foreign to them, such as poetry.

Much as prior exposure to a text makes students feel more comfortable deeply analyzing it in ways they hadn’t thought of before, their resulting new understanding of close-reading methods makes them feel more secure and ready for challenges when we enter our poetry unit. We practice collaborative close reading by analyzing a given poem line by line in a class-wide conversation. I ask students to think about word sequence, why lines are broken in particular places, how the poem sounds when read aloud, how ambiguity might allow for multiple meanings, whether such multiple meanings can be in play simultaneously or contradict one another. Discussing these issues as a whole class enables students to bounce ideas off one another, to find textual evidence to support their views and refute opposing ones, and to learn from the reading methods of their classmates, as well as to benefit from my guiding questions and high level of enthusiasm. This convivial environment makes interpreting seemingly difficult texts a friendlier and more productive experience for students.

I further build up students’ confidence by helping them realize the close-reading practice they already have. For example, their interest and ability increase when we discuss the similarities between close-reading a poem and close-reading a text message exchange, as both involve scrutiny of line breaks, word choice, tone, and approach to punctuation. I also often have students interpret song lyrics of their choosing as a homework assignment. This assignment shows students that poetry occurs in other media and genres that they are more experienced in close-reading.

While I give students oral feedback and ask constructive questions to guide their thinking in generative directions in class, I also open lines of clear communication for students to test ideas during scaffolded research assignments. Careful preliminary scaffolding makes students feel prepared for what could otherwise seem the arduous task of composing research papers. After reading their primary source, students write précis on a secondary source and post them to an online discussion board so that they can develop a shared resource bank of articles they have read. Students can use one another’s précis as readers’ guides to critical articles, and I tell them they can use one article they originally found via the discussion board. This helps make research feel more manageable, because students are already armed with two secondary sources when they use the library’s databases to find their next sources, often their first time seeking scholarly sources online.

Next, students write an annotated bibliography with a research topic to show the common point of entry for each of their sources; they then compose a proposal along with guiding questions to formulate their thinking. Students email me their annotated bibliographies and proposals. This allows me to give them the go-ahead promptly or to ask them to better flesh out their ideas, to find more suitable sources, to home in on their topic, to favor interpretation and argument over synthesis, to include more generative guiding questions, and so on. Students feel acknowledged and can then either move on to the next stage of their research or start revising promptly. Further, when I ask students to revise by a certain deadline, they practice their organizational skills. It is now their responsibility to organize their schedules, to distribute their workloads, and to be in touch with me to request a slight extension if the new deadline is simply unreasonable for them given other commitments.

Using email for this purpose enables prompt, efficient communication with students about their ideas as they develop and helps maintain a record of the trajectory of their thinking about this project over the course of the semester. I always cater the feedback I give a student to that student’s particular work, but processing student work relatively quickly and early in their research process allows me also to shape discussion and activities in class to help students grasp any concepts that prove troublesome for multiple students. Students feel that they’re not alone in their confusion when I tell them that many of their classmates are grappling with similar issues. We can also use such in-class discussions as a workshop space wherein students can suggest possible solutions to their classmates’ concerns about obstacles they may face in researching and writing, repeating these class-wide brainstorming sessions as necessary for the duration of the assignment.

During peer review, students learn that there are other ways of approaching any assignment, be they better, worse, or just different. Exchanging drafts with their peers not only gives students extra feedback in a low-stakes setting, but also improves conviviality in the classroom due to their small-group workshopping conversations. During group work, I walk around the room to check in with students. I often start these short chats by asking them for something going well in their partner’s paper, and something their partner could improve upon, guiding them to keep their focus on their classmate’s paper rather than their own. For peer review helps students think reflectively about writing while giving them a short break from their own writing. This defamiliarization with their own writing lets students return to it with a somewhat fresher view and better identify areas in which they can improve. As always, as I walk around the room, I carefully observe students’ strengths and weaknesses in order to tailor our course so I can build on students’ preexisting reading and writing backgrounds to give them the skills they most need.