Ye Won Joo
Ye Won Joo
Philosophy Statement
Philosophy Statement
‘Ohana is the term for “family” in Hawaiian, which is the very foundation of my philosophy of teaching. I strongly believe the best learning environment is where learners feel safe as if they were in their families. My beliefs about excellent teaching come from my own language learning and teaching experiences. Based on my experiences gained through living in different parts of the world, including Hawaii, where I have earned my Second Language Studies degrees at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, I have solidified five principles of effective teaching: The sense of ‘ohana, compassion for learners, purposefulness, critical and analytical thinking skills, and cooperative learning.
“‘‘Ohana’ means ‘family.’ ‘Family’ means ‘no one gets left behind’” (DeBlois & Sanders, 2002). As simple as it could sound, this is the most important value in my teaching philosophy. The importance of having a safe environment where everyone can function as a valuable member of the community by working hard towards a shared goal—language acquisition—and being responsible for their own actions cannot be emphasized more. In order to be responsive to all students and to create a safe learning environment for all, I create my lesson plans following the principles of inclusive pedagogy, a teaching method that offers an accessible and equitable education to all students (Ainscow, 2020). To maximize the potential of each student, I allow my students to rely on their full linguistic repertoires, namely translanguaging (Garcia, 2009), a pedagogical practice that helps multilingual students make sense of what they are learning. In my classroom, students are offered with different learning materials, such as visual aids, hands-on activities, readings, and in-person and video lectures. Also, they are often grouped together for small-group discussions where multilingual speakers can freely join their own language groups to discuss in their own languages then to share their discussions in English with the whole class, as needed.
I firmly believe all teachers must have compassion for their students. Without it, they cannot offer high-quality education. The profession of teaching requires much patience and perseverance, and for this, compassion is the top concern for me, as a good teacher. Compassion is what fuels me to continue seeking effective, creative, and innovative ways to help my students understand learning materials, including the use of technology, as in Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) to enhance the learning experience (Levy & Hubbard, 2005). As the world is experiencing an unprecedented life event caused by the global pandemic, the use of technology in education is proved to be indispensable. With adequate incorporation of technology into my teaching, I can reach out to a wider student population even in different parts of the world. For instance, I create video lecture materials to maximize the time spent in classroom to be used to have my students working on actual tasks, namely small group activities rather than listening to my lecture. Many of these video materials are tutorials for using certain learning platforms and essential software for college life. Additionally, I create mini lecture videos with the data collected from tickets out so that students can watch them as many times as they wish until they come to an understanding. Finally, I show my compassion for learners by being available for office hours, responsive to their needs, and flexible while interacting with them.
In the ecosystem, every single living organism has its own purpose of existence. I actively support this belief. Therefore, it must be the same when it comes to learning and teaching. Throughout my language learning and teaching experiences, Content-Based Instruction following the Content-Based Language Development (CBLD) Framework best represents the concept of purposefulness (Banegas, 2012). In CBLD Framework, every stage of the lesson plan is purposeful, thus relevant. I design my lessons with purposeful and meaningful activities with authentic materials, therefore useful to my students—they can make use of what they learn in class outside the classroom—which links to student engagement and learner motivation. To help my students strive for their best, I conduct student needs surveys regularly. With the collected data, I identify my students’ actual level to build their knowledge based on what they already know to match their ‘i+1,’ a concept theorized by Krashen that represents the level of input (information) being slightly higher than the learners’ actual level (Krashen, 1987). The survey results lead me to develop purposeful activities for my students’ specific needs. This allows me to provide as many opportunities as possible for them to practice the learned concepts and materials through carefully designed activities, which in turn, offer them chances to interact with each other; then, I offer my students meaningful feedback. Through these processes, I can guide my students to gain both content knowledge and language skills simultaneously.
We live in a world of vast and fast information. I, as a teacher, cannot tell my students which information or language forms are appropriate or inappropriate every time they make use of some language features or information they find in a newspaper or on the Internet. For this reason, I firmly believe that teachers must help their students develop critical and analytical thinking skills. To do so, I adhere to dialogic pedagogy, which helps learners talk through the problem to become aware of what they are learning. Such meaningful dialogues have been revealed to be effective, as they allow the learners to think more critically and analytically (Morrell, 2004). Of course, these skills cannot be acquired in one or two days. In this respect, I design in-class activities following the principles of the Gradual Release of Responsibility Framework, shifting the responsibility for learning towards my students gradually (Fisher, & Frey, 2013). By doing so, I can thoroughly guide my students throughout the whole process facilitating their learning experience to be less stressful but more secure. My typical classroom is highly dynamic and interactive due to the adherence to such pedagogical practices. In my classroom, students actively participate in pair work and group work; they ask questions whenever they need clarifications from both the teacher and their peers. By doing so, they develop their own academic independence, being responsible for their own learning.
This last principle brings back to the first principle of my teaching philosophy: the sense of ‘ohana. Lev Vygotsky’s Sociocultural theory emphasizes the importance of having advanced individuals in a learning environment (Lantolf, 2000). In a language classroom, whether divided by proficiency or not, there always exist vast ranges of proficiency levels. This can be considered a considerable disadvantage for a language teacher, but not from my perspective. I have seen in my teaching experiences, giving advanced learners opportunities to help less advanced learners—such a great responsibility—makes the learning environment not only a safe place but also a highly productive community. Students help each other throughout the whole learning process, compensating each other’s weaknesses with strengths. It is my job, as a teacher, to facilitate their learning by identifying their Zone of Proximal Development—the potential performance range that learners can achieve with help—to better scaffold their learning and by encouraging them to take care of each other when engaged in learning as an ‘ohana.
Learning a second language makes us feel vulnerable and dependent on someone for our lack of language proficiency. For my students, I want to be that someone who can guide them throughout their language learning journey by helping them feel at ease with compassion as if they were at home with their ‘ohana. I am convinced this is my responsibility as a teacher who knows what it means to be a language learner, to think critically, and to cooperate in order to find one’s own purpose for language learning.
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