Teaching is a dynamic act. The classroom environment is filled with ideas, contact points, confusion, and emerging awareness for both the students and the teacher. I seek an engaging classroom in which the construction of knowledge is a shared practice. I seek an environment that enables the transfer of knowledge and skills by valuing the lived experiences of students while employing inquiry, critical and creative thinking, and, most of all reflection. My ultimate goal is to empower students to take what we do together and apply it in and beyond the educational setting.
Because concepts bound in a single classroom experience will often fade more quickly than those students apply and use elsewhere, the importance of transfer cannot be overstated. Thus, the knowledge and skills that emerge in the classroom need to be malleable and adaptable. If students understand the structure and decision processes they use in this context, they can begin to analyze and reflect upon how to adapt to other places and situations. Through an active environment, I invite students to bring their experiences and make connections. I help students build heuristics and understand the scaffolding that they have used in the past in order make conscious decisions regarding how to make effective choices in the future.
For example, when working with students in the communication classroom, I encourage them to reflect on how they communicate on a daily basis. We ask why they make the choices they do and how they adapt to different audiences and concepts. From there we can analyze rhetorical situations they might come across in the future. Students investigate the ways they will communicate in their disciplines and with general audiences they find important. They then apply the concepts we discuss in class to these contexts and reflect upon the effectiveness of their choices and ways they can adapt to other situations.
When working with faculty, I encourage them to reflect on their histories as students. As faculty often fall back on their experiences, we tease out how they learned so we can discover why they make the decisions they make. We then analyze their classroom environments and seek new, sometimes innovative, sometimes tested, techniques. I ask faculty to reflect on the effectiveness of their decisions and to begin to analyze the audience and context to empower them to experiment, adapt, and grow as reflective practitioners concerned with the learning of their students and the betterment of their institutional context.
In essence, I don’t assume I have all the answers, nor do I assume that I hold the knowledge that must be given to the students. Rather, my role is to encourage inquiry, make suggestions when and where appropriate, and tease out the critical and creative processes that are a part of daily interactions in the discipline and in daily life.