TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

As an educator, I subscribe to writer-oriented and reader-oriented teaching philosophies. A student writer’s voice is very important to me, and I find the most fulfillment in helping a student find their voice and build their rhetorical confidence. I believe it is especially important to me to do this with students for whom Standard American English is not their primary discourse, and I am committed to working closely with these students to help them succeed. I believe in the “Students’ Right” to their own language and reject the claim that any one dialect is ‘neutral’ or ‘more appropriate’ than another. I want my students to challenge the status quo by utilizing their unique lived experiences, skills, languages, and literacies in their writing.

To that end, I employ an anti-racist and anti-ableist pedagogy in my teaching and curriculum. Speaking particularly about Black students, Elaine Richardson describes the guiding principle of this application as “searching out the ways that Black folks have understood, believed, approached, and used the English language to construct their identities and navigate their environments, using this information in a contemporary context to help students connect African American culture of struggle and subversion to literacy for social change” (Richardson 18). I also incorporate teachings from Disability Studies in order to make my curriculum as accessible as possible, especially by employing principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL). In the pedagogy of my composition classroom, UDL principles include encouraging collaboration and cooperative learning, diversifying media, fluctuating teaching methods, and allowing students to show their knowledge in a variety of ways (Dolmage 24).

I see the writer as central to the entire rhetorical process, and I see writing as primarily a way to foster personal development and advance personal goals. Because of this, I see myself positioned most closely with the Expressivist school of teaching composition. I place high value on the imaginative, social, and psychological development of the writer. According to Richard Fulkerson, “a truly ‘expressive’” composition course can lead to “greater self-awareness, greater insight, increased creativity, or therapeutic clarification of some sort” (Fulkerson 668). Because I take a writer-centric view, I see these outcomes as representing a kind of ‘knowledge of self’ that is inextricably linked with both antiracist pedagogy and a major purpose of writing itself.

My pedagogy is also particularly influenced by the concept of “wayfinding” presented by Alexander et al. in their article, “Toward Wayfinding: A Metaphor for Understanding Writing Experiences.” The authors describe “wayfinding” as “a searching, but also a doing – a working, creating, and discovering process” (Alexander et al. 122). This approach emphasizes what the individual writer thinks about their process and writing. Wayfinding “highlights the potential transience of the contexts in which people write and focuses on participants’ fluid ability to not only move among those contexts, but also to create their own niches” (Alexander et al. 124). I believe that creating this awareness of shifting contexts of writing is the best approach for helping students to see the myriad different tools and approaches they can use to write in that particular moment.

I see the most effective way of teaching writing as being to encourage freedom and the space for discovery. I view my writing classroom as a workshop – a setting where each student can work on their own individual projects and goals in the same space at the same time, a space populated with resources and tools to shape their work. I consider myself and the other students in class perhaps the most important resources in the workshop. I value the collaborative aspects of writing, and I feel it’s important to emphasize those even while students work on their own individual projects. As such, I rely on small group collaboration and one-on-one sessions to underline the important social contexts students are writing under.

Assignments I typically include in my teaching are a literacy narrative or “awareness project” (especially as the first major assignment), freewriting, journal keeping, reflective writing, and activities where we analyze audience, especially in the context of composing for accessibility. The literacy narrative in particular is a good exercise in giving students the freedom to explore themselves, what inspires them, and the conditions under which they’ve written in the past. In all assignments, I seek to maximize the agency students have to choose their topics, the language they use, the mode in which they deliver their projects, and whether or not to work independently or collaboratively.

In terms of student response and evaluation, I am influenced by Asao B. Inoue’s model of assessment as an anti-racist practice. I take seriously his argument that grading and ranking writing by a single standard is tantamount to participation in a “racist discourse of judgment because it too easily and often uses a white racial standard” that is constantly being reproduced (Inoue 376-77). My guiding questions while assessing a student’s work are, “What do I hear and see this student doing?” and “What do I think the student wants to do?” I strongly champion student agency, creativity, and risk-taking in choosing the language and mode in which they compose, and I believe grading against universal standards restrains the choices students can make. My feedback on drafts is specifically geared toward assessing where students are in relation to their own individual baselines and strategizing how they can continue to move past it.

WORKS CITED

Alexander, J., Lunsford, K., & Whithaus, C. (2019). Toward wayfinding: A metaphor for understanding writing experiences. Written Communication, 37(1), 104-131.

Dolmage, J. (2008). Mapping composition: Inviting disability in the front door. In C. Lewiecki-Wilson & B.J. Brueggemann (Eds.), Disability and the teaching of writing: A critical sourcebook (pp. 14-27). Bedford / St. Martin’s.

Fulkerson, R. (2005). Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century. College Composition and Communication, 5(4).

Inoue, A. B. (2019). Classroom writing assessment as an antiracist practice. Pedagogy, 19(3), 373-404.

Richardson, E. (2003). African American Literacies. London: Routledge.

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