My teaching philosophy focuses on balancing between competing forces students negotiate in the classroom. Fostering this balance requires a careful approach to productive tensions which foster student learning.
I take to heart Ann Berthoff’s credo to “Begin where they are.” Encouraging students to examine and respond to their current circumstances is challenging for all teachers, as students fit a broad spectrum of ages, citizenships, educational achievements, genders, races, and intellectual abilities. Additionally, students come to the classroom with a variety of ideas, political leanings, and cultural outlooks. Teaching requires we address all student perspectives through a unified class-based practice; this purposeful practice must fit the student diversity. I work toward a flexible understanding that addresses and respects each student from the first day, and then challenges students to step beyond imposed comfort zones. An openness to the unknown is required not only of students but of the teacher as well. For example, early in my career, I had a student approach me after class to explain his discomfort with class discussion concerning mental illness; he suffered schizophrenia, and the blithe tone he perceived in fellow students and his professor, whom he felt must be mentally well, hurt him deeply. I learned through this encounter to always keep the possibility of difference and diversity an option, and that I cannot always predict where my own resistance or misunderstandings may occur. An awareness of perspective and difference begins classroom encounters, requiring patience, consideration, and expectation of at-times difficult, negotiated communication. These encounters also offer exciting opportunities to both reconsider and change one’s environment and direction, by moving the student toward and even embracing new ideas, cultures, experiences, and differences.
Teaching must guide the student from a personal outlook to expanded considerations via social engagement. I begin by focusing on concepts of perspective and narrative practice, encouraging students to talk and to write. Free writing exercises often follow the introduction of new concepts and loosen up the imagination. Small group discussions allow students to feel more comfortable and relaxed among peers, and encourage each student to speak up. Follow-up discussions with the whole class open up group exercises to a larger forum and help to engage the classroom community’s editing function through the range of critical encounters with other students. The teacher’s job is to supervise this process, and ensure the delicate balance between comfortable expression and uncomfortable challenge. In today’s diverse classroom population, a consideration of pre-defined, unquestioned standards is both ripe for challenge and difficult to elicit, given the deep roots of these norms in students’ histories, identities, and cultures. The need to challenge one’s own assumptions include my own considerations, and I strive to model the self-questioning I ask of my students. I have at times re-considered expressed limitations mid-sentence: “So in this picture, here is a girl gazing into a heart-shaped mirror, possibly thinking of her boyfriend… Or girlfriend.”
I see my role as teaching students to work with tools that facilitate and hone expression. I value process teaching to edit content; the content in and of itself is of secondary value in the learning process. Student inspiration and expression is ultimately a matter of their own choices, foci, and experiences. Teaching requires the ability to educate students in the use of tools that will sharpen and deploy their ideas, tools that will aid them in eliciting, considering, reconsidering, criticizing, and finally producing the required object. The teacher must keep in mind that form can impose on expression in unknowable ways. Opinions expressed in free-writing activities may buckle under requirements imposed by formal assignments, or by a perception of the teacher’s expectations. Clear guidelines for assignments allow students to feel comfortable with formal tasks, but may also limit their interests. Students are encouraged to set the discussion parameters, even as they struggle to understand the practical parameters of class requirements and material goals. Essential to my work is striking a balance between what is required of students and what they bring to the classroom, and opening a space to explore the rhetoric between students’ past understandings and future considerations. A respect for diversity should be understood not only as addressing pre-existing identifications, but also as a means for understanding each student’s interpretive management of assignments; this includes the teacher’s respect for the student’s ability to manage assignments even as they interpret them through their own requirements for explorative growth.
The most important tension to balance in the classroom is between the teacher’s authority and the student’s. The ultimate goal of teaching is to disappear in a student’s learning process. I have succeeded when a student has taken over describing his or her outlook in relation to larger social demands, and his or her own way forward into a larger world.