As an instructor, I have worked with students in college level educational institutions. I believe that all students regardless of their background deserve a fair chance at receiving the best opportunities for their education. It is my goal as a teacher to amplify student’s creative and academic strengths while simultaneously working through any shortcomings to develop a student who can overcome the adversity and challenges that higher education can often throw at them.
It is with learning transfer that students, I believe they can achieve agency for their own education. I also believe teaching needs to incorporate a multimodal approach. Students learn through auditory, visual, and tactile means. By allowing space for those modes (video, powerpoint, demonstrations, reading, group work etc.) students in my classes are given more freedom to approach the subject matter through a mode that best fits their learning style. In doing so, students can achieve content mastery, critical thinking skills for problem solving, and be engaged within their peer community and school by way of their learning.
This ultimately leads to the collaboration of these three values as part of a greater goal for establishing learning transfer. According to the article "Teaching for Transfer" by Liane Robertson and Kara Tacz, "The TFT course’s three components—key terms, reflection, and students’ theory of writing—serve as means of bridging prior knowledge about writing to the new knowledge students are learning to increase successful transfer (emphasis added.)"
Bridging and this method of dialogue when engaging with students I believe is one that can be easily overlooked. As instructors we can easily discuss 50,000 foot views on ideas/pedagogy, as well as the closer dissection of a topic. But even this is more about awareness than bridging. I want to help students see the connections between each class, or at the very least, each class related to a specific topic at that time in the schedule. Being able to reference specific examples of, "remember when we talked about X last week?" can lead to really strong connections for students who may question why projects/topics/lectures are happening a certain way.
Two Areas I'm Working On:
Education is an ongoing process. The work of learning is never ending, even for the educator, and there are areas I will continue to work on in my professional development and pedagogy. Two of these areas I am focusing on currently are related to threshold concepts. When I consider "writing is a way of enacting disciplinarity," students are often expected to understand the principles of writing and how they are to engage within those principles in their academic and/or professional career. What this threshold concept aims to encourage is the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and the way writing and other communicative practices create a way to share this knowledge. I try to remind my students constantly that they are not writing in isolation. That all forms of writing are in conversation with someone or something else. I think that as the section continues with discussing citations, this also presents moments of engagement beyond what can feel like to students, siloed writing. By engaging with other works, understanding citations, and the way we use this information to invite discourse on a topic, it can open up our writing practices.
In the same way, the CCCC position on Undergraduate Research & Best Practices discusses how students are to "make a genuine contribution, however modest, to public knowledge of writing, whether academic (e.g., disciplinary knowledge), professional, or community-based." This very position ties directly into the threshold because of its value in helping students understand they are not just regurgitating information, but actively participating in the disciplinary conversation, even if only a little bit by way of our writing projects. By using group projects, real world examples, and identifying features of professional or academic expectations I aim to show students the ways in which writing can transcend the field in in which they study.