Teaching Philosophy

Seeing students create–their understanding of themselves, their world, and their art–is the ultimate goal of my teaching.

Teaching and learning in the English discipline are generative, inclusive, investigative, reflective, and lived experiences. Most foundationally, this English Education is generative for students and teachers–it is an academic and a collaborative space in which knowledge, art, empathy, questions, identity, perspectives, relationships, innovation, and unique ways of thinking about and naming the world are created or revised for oneself and shared with others. Simply put, there can be no English Education without creation of all kinds; without writing, discussion, and art as the basis for and goal of teaching and learning in the English discipline, the beauty of language and thought become mere scripted memories. English Education is also inclusive as it creates places to genuinely discuss and consider different contexts, interpretations, artforms, cultures, emotions, experiences, and lives–especially amid a diversifying student and literary landscape that demands and deserves more than the traditional, western canon of literature and thinking. English Education’s investigative quality therefore seeks to understand and go beyond these canonical perspectives by questioning the old hegemony, expanding our definition of “text” and “literature” (to include other works of art like music and film) and engaging more with new works, especially ones that are potentially disruptive or startling but essential for allowing students to make discoveries about themselves and their world. English Education’s investigative nature combines with its other facets to produce its reflectiveness: as students and teachers create understanding and work together to read difficult texts and their own writing, they begin to uncover their own identities and their relations to each other, to other places, and to other times, all while remaining vigilantly critical of their own work, learning, and place within the world and history. These critical, personal, and historical awarenesses–cultivated through integrated and interdisciplinary units, lessons, and texts–entail the respectful and mature acceptance of discomfort, questions, and disagreements, particularly for and with those who hold power in life, in school, in class, and in our texts. With this reflectiveness leading the charge, English Education’s other aspects all mix to make it, most importantly, a lived experience: it allows for the continual exploration, understanding, and reformation of thinking, language, each other, and oneself in the fullness of life’s experiences as captured in a story’s plot and dialogue, in a song’s imagery and rhyme, in a classroom’s collaboration and laughter, in a school’s collegiality and spirit, in life’s occupations and relationships, and in change’s necessity and justice.