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This will be a teaching philosophy about change. As a teacher, I strive to connect the literature and culture of the past to the experience of the present. We live, in many respects, in a time without history. Remembering, engaging with, and reacting to the past as if it were part of our present moment is too frequently tossed by the wayside in favor of profit, promotion, and “me.” As a teacher, I am a workhorse, committed to the “we.” I teach classes that need to be taught because of scheduling, I serve on the committees that need to be peopled, and I teach the literature of the past, which is difficult and, in the words of some students, “boring” and “irrelevant.” I teach in the core, which increasingly seems to be losing its value or is set up as an obstacle to your degree that must be overcome. As a teacher, I strive to remember that those are a handful of students only--and though it can be wearisome, even soul-crushing at times, it affords me the opportunity to ask, and develop answers to, questions that matter: Why do we have to do this? Why read this, and not something else? Why does Eliza Haywood, or Daniel Defoe, or Jane Austen matter? Why is it important that we investigate the literature of the Ottoman Empire? What perspective does it offer on how we understand modernity? Why is it essential that we engage with a multitude of voices, strange and unfamiliar as they may be, and take them seriously? Why should we care about the stories of a foreign culture, an anomaly from another time? What does it matter if we learn about the history of the dictionary as a mode of knowing, or how many women cross-dressed and went to sea as pirates, or what it really took to print a book in the early modern period? How many women actually did, contrary to popular opinion, write in and contribute to and help create the modern world we live in? And how does that knowledge change us?
I hope, as you’re reading this, that the value of these questions has become self-evident.
The philosophy behind my pedagogy is, essentially, that everything we do has meaning, and it is our job to discover it and to engage with it honestly. We have to become curious. Practically, that might mean taking an assignment seriously, even if it’s “just” the formatting; it might mean actively trying to find a question that matters to you; it might mean being open to a new perspective. And this includes me--as a teacher, I seek always to better my teaching, to reshape it, and to try new things--to stay curious.
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching Philosophy
One thing I have become sure of is that traditional writing assignments--no matter how much I might be drawn to them, find them familiar and comforting--are no longer as useful as I’d like them to be. The best parts of traditional writing projects foreground the thesis statement and argumentation, evidence and analysis, appropriate and well-documented research, voice and audience. These are all things that can just as effectively--perhaps more so--be engaged in assignments that ask students to marry the written with the spoken, the scripted with the seen. To be sure, this does not mean that writing should be decreased. Increasingly, I have been turning to alternative research projects that incorporate a reflective component and a scripted new media component, and this is something I am committed to exploring as I continue to grow as a teacher. In the next four years, I plan to apply for a faculty development grant and radically reshape my approach to assignments and syllabus development to foreground projects that span the entire term, can be produced individually and in pairs or small groups, and incorporate technology consciously as a mechanism of inquiry--in LT-1 and LT-2 core courses as well as advanced content courses. My goal here is not only to invigorate my own teaching--after all, courses will need to be re-shaped dramatically, new texts invoked--but also to engage my students more effectively in the active, hands-on processes of learning with others and for themselves. The best parts of my teaching are the moments when a student does something she thought she’d never be able to do, makes a connection that wasn’t visible at first, or grapples with a tough concept and comes out its friend. Sometimes this happens in lecture, which I approach as a form of narrative performance where I engage actively with students--indeed, my lectures are not really “lectures” in the traditional sense of the word. I will stop at points and ask someone to read passages aloud, ask for specific responses in writing or orally, move the full class discussion along through a Socratic questioning session, show a video, incorporate a tactile activity or a group quiz. My lectures are organized almost entirely around specific examples, as I am guided by the belief that specificity and uniqueness bring the past to life--An Experiment with an Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby, passages from and images of Sor Juana's work and life, or a sonnet by John Donne. Sometimes this happens in writing workshop or as a result of feedback, which I spend a great deal of time on in my classes. In my future development as a teacher-scholar of the 18th century, I want to shape the content I select into more tightly-focused themes, incorporating additional authors of color and non-canonical materials as well as contemporaneous discourse specifically about gender, sexuality, class, and race. By incorporating less-anthologized materials, new readers can engage on an individualized level. Similarly, hands-on experience of early modern material culture can also bring the past to life, and this is something I hope also to strengthen into the future. Without a clearer sense of material context, it is the extraordinary student indeed who can bring a specific example into focus. Indeed, this is a pattern that marks especially my LT-2 courses and courses in the major.
When students can turn a lecture into a story that makes sense to them, the pieces of history begin to fit together into a coherent shape, and authors seem to be in conversation with one another. The assignments I use that best suit these goals are journaling assignments, in-class team study sessions, and independently-motivated projects like correcting 18th-century facsimile text that has been poorly OCRed, creating audio books, developing Wikipedia entries, making informational videos or web pages, creating Twitter feeds for characters in a novel, generating interpretations of novels through distant reading techniques, and so on (I will discuss these at more length in other sections of this teaching portfolio). Traditional writing assignments don’t do for my students what they did for me--provide a defined, targeted space in which I was free to craft whatever reality I could support persuasively. As I continue to grow into myself as a teacher, I have realized that I don’t want to be someone who issues arbitrary dicta from some mysterious place my students cannot grasp. While this is not how I teach currently--I strive for clarity of purpose in all areas of my pedagogy--it is something that students taking unfamiliar humanities classes frequently feel, and it’s important that we respond.
So ultimately, this is a teaching philosophy about change--how I hope my students change, but mostly how I hope to. To help students become curious learners, we have to continue to take risks, too.
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