Here's a teaching statement I wrote recently
Teaching is complex and multifaceted. Hence, excellence in teaching can arise in several different ways. The distinctive aspects of my undergraduate teaching and mentoring are due, in part, to the unique personal experiences that I bring to the classroom and to the laboratory. This statement shares how my work as an educator at the University of Minnesota has been influenced by three facets of my personal experience.
The first of these is my experience of education as a tool for social and economic mobility. It is nearly incontrovertible that possessing a four-year college degree is one of the biggest factors (if not the biggest single factor) in advancing in socioeconomic status. This is even truer today than it was in my parents’ generation. I am a second-generation college student. My late father was raised in dire poverty in rural Western New York. He was the first in his family to attend college, which he did over his parents’ strenuous objections. My father saw college as a means to improve not only his economic life, but the life of his mind. My mother was also a first-generation college student (albeit later in life) whose father was a machinist at Westinghouse. Throughout my childhood, my parents emphasized to me that a higher education would lead not only to a greater likelihood of financial success, but would give me the intellectual foundation to do good for the community, as well. I strive to carry that message forward to my students.
My experience with education as a tool for mobility strongly informs my teaching and student interaction in SLHS 1301, Physics and Biology of Spoken Language, and SLHS 1302, Rate Your World. These are courses that our department offers as part of the University’s Liberal Education curriculum for physical sciences and mathematical thinking, respectively. I often teach both courses in a given academic year. Both attract a diverse group of students, from honors students to those who are struggling. For students who are struggling, completing the physical sciences and math requirements are a seemingly insurmountable hurdle to receiving a degree. For those students, and for fresh-faced first-year students, success in classes like SLHS 1301 and 1302 can make the difference between completing a four-year degree, or leaving college. I make a special effort to share my family’s story with these students. Moreover, I strive to present the content of the class in a way that helps students see how it connects to their educational and professional goals. The seemingly straightforward task of plotting distributions of data in the statistical programming tool R can be made more interesting when it is made personally relevant, such as plotting income distributions to illustrate skewness in data. A discussion of the relative utility of the arithmetic mean and the median is more powerful when embedded in a discussion of economic realities. I work especially closely with first-generation students, many of whom are less familiar with aspects of higher education that others take for granted. This sometimes means tracking down a student who has missed multiple classes and finding ways to continue to involve the student in class. Seeing an ‘a-ha’ moment when a student realizes the broader relevance of a mathematical or physical-sciences concept is a transformational moment for student and teacher alike. For the student, it means the promise of approaching life’s problems with a depth and breadth that would not be possible without higher education. For me as a teacher, it is a moment that shows me the greater good in what I do.
The second facet of my experience that influences my teaching is that of education as a transformation of a world-view. This experience comes from my research program. The central questions that my research addresses concern the multilayered nature of the speech signal: a single utterance of the word <cat> conveys regular semantic information, as well as information about the speaker herself and her intention for how that utterance should be interpreted in the ongoing discourse. I study how people untangle these many meanings, and how children acquire them. This provides a powerful metaphor for the kinds of knowledge I try to engender in my students. Successful speech-language pathologists and audiologists must be able to analyze the speech, language, and hearing abilities of people from multiple vantage points. The transformation of a world-view is a recurring theme in courses like SLHS 3305W, Speech Science, and SLHS 3304, Phonetics. SLHS 3304 has the primary goal of fostering students’ development of skills to analyze the sound structure of language, including phonetic transcription. Phonetic transcription turns out to be a rather daunting task: to hear the sound structure of language, one needs to ignore words’ spelling, the minute differences between talkers, and the expectations about pronunciation that have been built up over a lifespan. To do this, students must become aware of the way that biases affect language perception. To improve this skill this, I give students the opportunity to be participants in speech-perception experiments and to see first-hand how readily their percepts of sounds can be made to change. Following this, I have students actively work to suppress these biases when transcribing speech. Again, a strong part of teaching this is modeling that I have allowed my world-view to be changed over the course of my life as I learn and experience new things. I emphasize to students how my thinking about topics has changed over time, so that they become similarly open to making changes in their own thinking.
The final way that my experience shapes my teaching is being willing to make a personal change. In my life I have had to make some key personal transformations so that I can live in a manner that is healthy and sustainable. This has meant abandoning long-held beliefs, habits, and behaviors, and developing new ways of living. The key to this transformation is willingness to work, and willingness to change. Willingness cannot be taught. It can, however, be modeled. I have modeled this behavior in all of my classes, but perhaps most strongly in my one-on-one research mentoring. When working with undergraduate researchers, I share with them the ways in which my research studies have forced me to think differently about questions whose answers I thought I knew. I encourage students to see each research project as most successful if it raises more questions than it answers. I share the ways that my own life-changes have enriched, and probably prolonged, my life. For me, the most rewarding part of teaching and advising is when a student transforms and grows because of what she has learned. I have tried to foster these transformations by being a rigorous classroom teacher, by holding students to very high standards, and by providing them with the resources they need to be successful learners. I take immense pleasure in the moments I share with my students.