Teaching Vision Statement
I have a photo of my daughter Addie, five years old, squatting on the floor reading a picture book to our orange house cat. Addie, coiled taut with energy and empowered by her new reading ability, has magically forced an audience from our typically disinterested feline. Addie chatters away both reading and inventing her own version of the narrative running through the story. This photo in all its kinetic joy embodies the act of making meaning and building knowledge. James Britton writes, “We do not learn from the higgledy piggledy of events as they strike the senses, but from the representation we make of them.” It is this fundamental concept of making meaning together that frames my philosophy towards teaching.
As a teacher/scholar, I view the classroom as a transformative space where students are learning through conversing, analyzing, and constructing meaning with others in respectful dialogue, and I strive for this classroom to feel completely different from many students’ past educational experiences. By focusing in on making sense together in every class of “the higgledy piggledy” nature of academic speak, texts, and the complex discourse of college life, students come to understand the social construction of language, and that meaning making requires collaboration. Our students are truly global citizens; many are highly multilingual, technologically capable, have complex and often harrowing lived experiences due to movement across national boundaries. These are students who are incredibly invested in their own learning. I view my classroom and time in the writing center as situated moments where I can focus intently on what my students have to say both in discussion and in writing. I encourage them to tell their stories and reflect upon who they are, what their goals are, and how they are learning.
I aim to develop students’ skills and identities as writer/scholars and global citizens: Each day as I enter both the classroom and writing center, I think about how I will start by first listening to my students. After all, I am here to serve students, to learn with them through asking questions and problem-posing (Freire) and teaching writing, reading, and creating knowledge in ways that meets each student’s individual learning needs, styles, and goals (Gardner). I believe listening as a starting point embodies an act of compassion and empathy not always apparent in higher education (hooks). Comments from students over the past decade of my writing center and classroom instruction reveal students want to be competent writers, readers, critical thinkers, and communicators. I believe they can blossom as writers when met with empathy, respect, and connection by teachers and peers throughout every stage of the learning process.
In the writing center, where I spend the majority of my teaching time, I focus on the moment. I often start with open ended questions, and then I listen and gauge where the writer wants to go and where they need to go to create a piece of writing or connect with a text. Always invested in the present moment, I try to pull from students their own sense of the intertextual nature of the writing and reading they are engaged in for class: “How does what you have written right here reflect what this sociologist says in your class article? What part of his idea here on page three fits in with your view of the sociological imagination? Tell your reader how it all connects.” Situatedness also requires active listening, and as a writing coach, I try to employ this skill in each interaction. Writing center work often comes with a lot of emotional labor, but I have found that my students’ personal stories and lived experiences are integral to me understanding where they are positioned in their academic lives. While these stories may not always be explicitly represented in their writing, their complex life narratives do in fact circle around and through their writing, and that matters in how I help them focus on their academic work.
To facilitate a high level of student learning and engagement, I strive to understand my student’s personal contexts, linguistic and literacy backgrounds, and I work in partnership with native speakers and multilingual learners to help students consciously pull from their languaging repertoire (O. Garcia) in self-reflective ways. For example, writing activities might ask students to reflect on how they can approach invention; revealing that they utilize both their mother tongue and second language of English (L2) to brainstorm, while later shifting to drafting in both Spanish and English. In examining their findings through oral or written narrative based process reflection, students create agency over how they build a language repertoire or toolbox. I also infuse critical thinking in my activities and assignments, so students can harness all stages of higher order thinking from summary to analysis and synthesis to creating altogether new writing (Bloom). One in-class example engages students to examine a text of their choosing and first create informal writing to analyze the rhetorical features. Next the informal writing shifts to writing a traditional rhetorical analysis essay. Later in the unit, students engage in a follow up assignment that asks students to create a ‘re-mix’ through a multimodal presentation that draws on visual media, music, art, and other modes to examine the rhetoric from a new lens. Scaffolding activities and assignments expose students to writing in diverse genres, modes, and contexts that encourage them to regularly assess the changing nature of audience, message, purpose, voice, and context, while promoting their own authentic voice and agency over their own language. The multi-modal re-mix project helps students see that they are scholars in a global world, because they create blog posts that connect their writing with both classmates and strangers who might read their work.
Always a product of past experiences, cultures, and contexts, students have multiple opportunities to engage in readings that reflect students’ lived experiences; we read Angie Thomas, Gloria Anzaldua, pop culture texts, Harvey Milk and MLK to name a few. One of the reasons the picture of Addie reading to the cat resonates with me lies in how important and connective narrative is in our daily lives. Texts speak to readers, and readers speak back to texts, and in the classroom, I believe texts and readers engage best with an audience. I make it a practice to find spaces to read to my students when we start a new text. I employ voices, expressions, I pause and talk out my reactions as I read to model effective reading and critical thinking. As a community of scholars, we read chunks of passages together and discuss meanings and interpretations. While such a reading approach is an investment in time, I know that it is worth it. Students often tell me that it is their favorite part of class, and the read-a-louds motivate them to engage with class texts and finish readings. There is never a better feeling than to hear a student mid-way through the semester say that they finished the novel and talked the ears off their roommate by explaining the concept from the article or a character from the novel in detail.
Because I see both myself and my students as scholars of the world, I engage in collaborative writing through group work, student created mini-lectures, and use of emergent technology. I believe such an orientation towards writing will serve students well when they enter a complex and globalized workforce. But while collaboration is important, I also employ individualized teaching through grammar instruction focused on locating and learning individual patterns of error (Ferris), Generous instructor feedback that spurs substantive revision engages the recursive nature of writing and literacy development to promote a positive self-view of student writing identity. Finally, metacognition, or thinking about how one learns (Vygotsky) is infused in each informal and formal writing assignment. I want students to know the answer behind why (Shaughnessy) they make rhetorical, grammatical, and process-based moves and other choices in their writing because it can empower them with confidence. I want them to read and write with the energy and authority that my daughter exhibits in the picture below.
I believe by displaying my love and passion for learning and writing, my students develop confidence and a measure of joy in their writing identity and ability. Watching that student writer transformation develop over time is magical.
Addie and Nano in fall of 2017 reading a Mo Willems book.
