To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.
bell hooks
I believe that respect, care, and community are all conditions for learning. However, it is not just our students who are learning–I am always learning too. A vibrant college is created when both students and faculty are constantly growing and adapting in relationship to each other. An atmosphere of mutual regard and curiosity–one that asks questions and respects the life experiences of one another–fosters the best teaching, service, and scholarship. These conditions create impact in the classroom, on the campus, in the community, and in the scholarly field more broadly.
When I was an undergrad majoring in English, I worked part-time and commuted to my classes. Even though I enjoyed the abstractions of critical theory and the distant worlds of literature, I thrilled at those moments when my studies illuminated the sometimes-baffling complexities of my “real” world experiences by building skills and engaging in material that felt connected to my life outside of class. I remember those moments that brought meaning and relevance to my education, and I work to create a classroom grounded in the material realities of my students.
To achieve this, I aim to always be receptive and adaptive to student needs and experiences. I listen to my students and respond to them with respectful intellectual challenges and a focus on skills development, and I work to connect the literacies students learn in my classroom to the civic literacies they need to be active and responsible global citizens. Ultimately, I strive to send students out into the world with an understanding of how lifelong learning can be transformative, empowering, and material.
This approach to teaching takes shape through three key principles.
- Growth, Change, and Adaptation: Responding to student needs using research-based practices
Each year, I become even better acquainted with the students at City Tech, and as a result I am constantly shifting and adapting my classroom to better respond to their interests and needs. I always work to better understand and respond to student needs in the classroom by offering learning activities that appeal to a variety of learning styles and that use research-based practices for effective teaching and learning, such as academic service learning, writing intensive courses, collaborative assignments and projects, learning communities, open digital pedagogy, and place-based learning.
For example, I began teaching ENG 2180 (Studies in Identity and Orientation) as an Open Educational Resource course, drawing on the virtual textbook I created as part of an OER Fellowship in 2018. The shift to open and zero cost course materials required a complete redesign of the course, and this was my first experience teaching students without requiring the purchase of physical texts. For an assignment at the beginning of the semester, I obtained free copies of a broadsheet entitled “What is 21st Century Liberation?” published by the art and activism group VisualAIDS. VisualAIDS created the broadsheet to “address the complex intersectional issues that link AIDS activism with LGBTQI+ activism, and with all forms of social justice activism, both historically and today” upon the 50th anniversary of Stonewall. I asked the students to read and respond to the publication by writing a paragraph modeled on those in the broadsheet about what the word “liberation” means to them personally. This activity asked students to use critical reading and writing to engage with an intersectional analysis of their own social location and to take a position on the meaning of a term that is used in social justice and political contexts. They posted these reflections on the class OpenLab site and engaged in a virtual discussion with each other. Following this activity, I invited several students to read their reflections at the “Studying Stonewall: Teaching, Learning and Talking about the Intersections of Sexuality, Gender, Race and Class in the Classroom” diversity dialogue, part of The Studying Stonewall Project: Events and Activities In Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the Stonewall Uprisings, hosted by The LGBTQI+ Faculty and Staff Group and the Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion in the Curriculum and Education and co-sponsored by Gender & Sexuality Studies. After the roundtable, one of my participating students came up to me and thanked me, saying that as an immigrant woman she had never felt brave enough to speak about the gender dynamics in her culture but she felt empowered to do so in my class and at the roundtable. This was a powerful moment that raised up student voices like hers and honored the reading and analytic work they were doing in the classroom.
In other classes, I often adapt to student need by integrating active learning and high-impact teaching practices in response to challenges. For example, in one semester of “Gothic Literature and Visual Culture” (Eng 3407), the class got off to a slow start. I struggled to generate active participation even though many students expressed initial interest in the subject matter. Because of their diverse educational backgrounds, some students seemed overwhelmed by the content and others seemed bored. We were all a bit frustrated, so one day I took stock of my pedagogical approach—how could I account for such a wide range of student interest and experience? I remembered those revelatory moments in my own undergraduate classrooms when distant texts and concepts came to life through their connections to my lived experience, and I consulted George Kuh and Carol Geary Schneider’s High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter to figure out how to ground the course material in a way that engaged all of my students. I decided to refocus the class on a collaborative, place-based project that asked students to find a local “Gothic” location and establish its Gothicness based on a list of characteristics we developed together throughout the semester. In online travel-blog style profiles, the students related their location to both a theoretical concept from the course (such as the sublime or the uncanny) and one of our assigned texts (such as Frankenstein or “Young Goodman Brown”). The class then collaborated to create a new OpenLab site based on their field research, naming the site “Gothic NYC: A New Perspective on the Big Apple.” In addition to writing and posting their individual location profiles, they worked together to write the remaining site content, to post images and videos to supplement their profiles, and to add an interactive Google map with all of the locations tagged. We had a site launch day in class in which students presented their work to each other in the format of a scholarly conference. The collaborative, place-based strategy paired with the open digital format gave students a sense of ownership and audience, and they approached the task with confidence. They ended up engaging with each other and the course topics with an enthusiasm that I hadn’t previously seen during the semester, and the resulting site offers an impressive complexity of analysis, a display of information literacy, and an integration of course concepts. At the end of the semester, one of my most reserved students emailed, “I take pride, if that is the word to describe it, on saying that I really learned a lot in your class, more than I could imagine.”
In both of these instances, the students were enthusiastic about the connections that they were able to make with each other and between abstract concepts, texts, and lived realities. It was also transformative for my teaching, as I learned that challenges in the classroom can be opportunities for adaptation and growth.
- Challenge and Support: Creating a safe environment for trial and error
I advocate for excellence in the classroom by creating a rigorous yet supportive atmosphere. Specifically, I attempt to do this by challenging students while creating a safe environment for trial and error, a pedagogical approach designed to support both personal and academic student growth. This often involves fostering confidence in students by flipping the classroom (having them take on a teacherly role), supporting their growth outside of the classroom, and integrating low stakes assignments throughout the semester that encourage students to step outside of their comfort zones to try new skills.
For example, in “Studies in Identity and Orientation” (Eng 2180) we explore intersectional identity through American literature, and the students enthusiastically participate in challenging classroom conversations about gender, sexuality, race, class, and ability. Some students take the course because of an existing personal or academic interest in the subject matter, and some students take the course without any prior knowledge of the content. I work to validate the students with existing knowledge (without leaving the others behind) by stepping back and allowing them to take on a teacherly role. My hope is that a flipped classroom will support learning for all the students, even though there might be a discrepancy in knowledge bases. Some of the most vibrant student interactions often take place virtually on our course OpenLab in the context of weekly critical response blogs. Here students post thoughtful responses to the course concepts and texts, engage in complex discussions, and continue to teach each other. They also form important community structures online, with their virtual discussions indicating developing friendships and support networks outside of class. In addition to achieving the learning outcomes of the course, I am proud to successfully create a classroom that was simultaneously challenging and supportive. In the Student Evaluation of Teaching, student comments included: “This class was one of the best classes I’ve taken in my college career. I knew of some of the things that were taught throughout the semester, but what I enjoyed was that I was constantly being taught something new. It was never a time that I was in class, where I didn’t feel like I wasn’t learning something.,” and “It’s a very eye-opening and informative class. The professor will make sure you understand material without making you feel confused.”
In English 2180, I also recently began integrating small excerpts from an Open Access LGBTQ+ Studies textbook paired with the literary texts that we read each week in order to provide a framework for discussing and understanding the relevant concepts in the literary texts. What we all quickly discovered was that the textbook was challenging! However, that didn’t dissuade me or the students–instead it prompted me to change the way I assigned the readings. For each of the textbook excerpts, I asked students to annotate a collaborative copy of the excerpt on Google Docs, highlighting the words that were unfamiliar to them and inserting questions using the comments function when they found the concepts confusing. Then when we returned to class, I pulled up the annotated document on the screen, and we used it to guide the day’s discussion. It also fostered asynchronous discussions outside of class through the back and forth of question and answers in the comments section of the document. Finally, I created a new semester-long project, a “Collaborative Glossary” where I put all of the highlighted words and both the students and myself could add definitions (and new words) throughout the semester. This gave students a sense of agency in the face of a challenge, fostered teamwork because of its collaborative nature, and helped the students learn the material with more depth and confidence. In the final reflective essay, one student perfectly expressed this sense of agency: “When I initially signed up for the course, I was not looking forward to it because I had developed my own ideas of what gender, sex, and sexuality was. However, as the weeks passed, I was fascinated with how complex gender studies and identity was. One thing I will continue to do after the course ends is to explore the intersectionality of my own identity and teach it to my family and friends because sometimes they think of me in a certain way that does not reflect my true identity. Therefore, I would like to thank Professor Westengard for developing an excellent course.”
When I taught “Introduction to Women’s Studies” (Eng 2160), I was excited to present students with challenging material via critical scholarly essays paired with novels I had never taught before, including The Color Purple (Alice Walker) and Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie). In order to help students engage with the course learning outcomes around “world cultures and global issues,” I developed a new “Global Feminisms” research project that asked students to visit the University of Michigan’s online Global Feminisms Project, “a collaborative international oral history project that examines the history of feminist activism, women’s movements, and academic women’s studies in sites around the world.” Students chose a specific location, watched an interview from that location, and researched the history and present-day situation of women and girls in that country. They then gave a presentation to teach their classmates what they learned and led a brief discussion that tied their research in with the literary topics we had been discussing in class. They concluded the project with a short reflective essay. This assignment proved to be challenging for many students, for some because of the research component and for others because of the public speaking. At times, they seemed frustrated with me for the level of scholarship I was requiring, but at the end of the semester, they not only learned about global issues but seemed to be proud of the hard work they put in. Despite the challenges, at the end of the semester I received feedback from students saying, “I really liked your class and you as a professor as well. You helped me improve my writing skills,” and “It has been a wonderful semester, and I enjoyed being your student.”
- Vibrant and Fun: Creating a lively classroom through games, group work, and media
Students learn when they are active and having fun. I always attempt to keep the students awake and energized by carefully designing lessons that include a variety of approaches to learning during a single meeting. This often involves visual interactive lectures, individual writing prompts, “pair and share” discussions, games, collaborative activities, and things that get students up and out of their seats.
My Fall 2021 ENG 3407 section was a partially synchronous online modality, meaning that I met students in a synchronous Zoom classroom one day of the week and held asynchronous classes on the second day. I have always incorporated asynchronous components in my in-person literature classes, which usually involved weekly critical response blogs that students completed on OpenLab by an end-of-week deadline. This translated well to the online environment, but I also added pre-recorded lectures to the asynchronous portion of the class, which I recorded with visual slides, edited in Camtasia, and posted to a private YouTube channel for student viewing. Though online learning and the partial synchronous modality had the potential to be challenging for students, I maintained strong attendance and participation throughout the semester in part because of the video components that made “contact” with students when we weren’t meeting synchronously. At the end of the semester a student emailed me stating that “This class has been my favorite experience this semester! Honestly, has me falling in love with Gothic Literature all over again. Thank you for everything and I really hope I can take another class with you! You make me almost want to be an English major.” At a college of technology, I take it as quite an accomplishment to “almost” make students want to be an English major, indicating that they found the joys of lifelong learning in the literature classroom.
In English Composition I, we have played games such as a “Reflective Annotated Bibliography Scavenger Hunt” in which students break into groups and each group receives a copy of a sample Reflective Annotated Bibliography. On the screen, I project a list of ten items to locate on the sample such as a bibliographic entry in MLA format, rhetorical analysis of a source, research question, etc. Students enthusiastically engage in a friendly competition for which group will be the first to (correctly!) find all of the items in the sample RAB. This is a lively activity that not only gets students to carefully analyze an example of the unit writing they are working on, but the game play element means that we review the items as a class each time a group claims to have finished the hunt. We end up going over and over the RAB elements, meaning I have many opportunities to explain the elements in various ways and students have ample opportunity to understand them through repetition.
In addition to actual games, I create fun active learning activities with game-play elements and media. To learn about writing introductions in a composition class, I developed an activity that integrates music videos. In this scaffolded activity, students participate in discussion, group work, and individual writing to develop several sentences summarizing a music video. They then add elements to that summary in order to build a complete introduction paragraph. We screen a music video, discuss the video and its argument, and then students write out an author summary that includes the video’s argument and three main points. We brainstorm as a class about the various options for creating “hooks” to catch a reader’s attention at the beginning of an essay. After this discussion, students add a hook to the beginning of their existing summary paragraph. Then the students practice several types of brainstorming to develop their own opinion in response to the video’s argument. Once they have brainstormed, they add their thesis to the end of their existing summary paragraph. Finally, students read their completed introduction paragraphs aloud to a partner and discuss them both in pairs and as a class. Students respond to a lively classroom with interest and enthusiasm, often expressing surprise and gratefulness for activities and assignments that speak to their needs and interests. Students have responded that “The essay prompts were actually about things I cared about, which made me enjoy the class more” and “The subject matter was intriguing and kept me interested all semester.”
In conclusion, I intentionally work to “respect and care for the souls of students” by supporting student learning via a deep respect for their lived realities, their needs, and their interests. I hope to send students away from my classroom with the learning outcomes and for the course but also with the confidence and skills to succeed in college and beyond, an appreciation for lifelong learning, and a sense agency around their own learning process.
