TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

I believe that the college classroom can be a space of transformative worldmaking. Therefore, I believe that it is my job as a teacher to empower students to envision and create the worlds they want to live in. Though my approach to teaching is multifaceted and ever-evolving in the face of new challenges and opportunities, I find the following three priorities to be most central to my method and philosophy of teaching: critical thinking, agency, and high-impact practices. Together, I believe these core commitments cultivate a classroom environment where students can question the world, question themselves, take ownership of their learning, and grow as learners and as worldmakers.

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To effectively encourage critical thinking, I never ask my students to take the concepts I teach them at face value.  Instead, I urge them to consistently ask the following questions: why things are the way they are, how common assumptions came to be, what function certain concepts serve in the world and for whom, as well as what their personal role is in relationship to certain concepts. For example, when teaching Gender and Communication, I begin the semester by presenting the following conception of gender: that gender is something we do, not something we are. I then encourage students to consider how they come to understand themselves as gendered beings and how they present their gendered selves to the world. This leads to rich conversations about how each of us are socialized to perform masculinity and/or femininity and how we embody our identities. I then ask students to consider the stakes of performing gender in particular ways. Through this line of questioning and discovery, students develop a more critical outlook on the concept of gender and how their performances of gender are shaped by and shape the world. I find that, after performing a similar line of questioning with other “big” concepts in the class, the students start to question other course concepts and develop the critical muscle to start asking these kinds of questions themselves.

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Furthermore, I find that part of students’ journey to becoming critical thinkers is the development of agency in their own education. I ensure that students take ownership of their own learning and I aim to act as a facilitator of learning rather than a disseminator of knowledge. To accomplish these goals, I use a choose-your-own adventure model for major assignment categories in many of my classes. In other words, students are presented with several options in major assignment categories and they ultimately make choices for how they will earn points in those categories (for example, they might select one out of three paper options for their Writing points). I find that, by giving students this much agency over how they learn in the class, they take ownership and accountability over their learning and feel empowered, rather than disciplined, by the learning process. This creates a level of trust between student and instructor that then leads to deeper, richer class conversations and written work.

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Lastly, the promotion of critical thinking and agency set the foundation for a classroom that engages in high-impact practices. High-impact practices, which promote deep learning and student engagement, have been shown to have a positive differential impact on historically underserved student populations, which is a significant reason why I prioritize them in all my classrooms. Two examples of high-impact practices I use are long-term writing projects and assignments that require students to probe their life experiences. When teaching classes on Rhetorical Criticism, the students’ final deliverable for the class is to write a piece of rhetorical criticism. To engage high-impact learning, I have students choose their topic early on in the semester so that every activity and assignment, whether it is drafting their literature review or learning a new course concept, allows them to grapple with their topic from a new angle. This allows students to develop their ideas and arguments in new ways and from different perspectives throughout the semester. I also use a variety of activities in my classes that require students to probe their life experiences. Take, for example, my gender norm violation project—an assignment that asks students to violate a norm associated with their gender and reflect on the experience using course concepts. This assignment achieves the level of high-impact by having students take course concepts out of the classroom, engage deep learning in a real-life scenario, then report back in a reflective manner. Both of these high-impact practices have yielded strong positive results, including students expressing greater understanding of the significance of the class because of how it relates to their own lives as well as students’ writing competencies and confidence increasing dramatically over the course of the semester.

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Taken together, I believe my pedagogical priorities foster a class environment where students know they are valued in their diversity and wholeness, where they can take risks, and where they can begin to envision and create the worlds they want to live in. Cultivating critical thinking skills urges students to question the world around them in its current state, developing a sense of agency assures them that they have a role to play in changing the world, and high-impact practices provide structure and opportunities for engagement as they start to formulate their visions of a transformed world. Therefore, I maintain a commitment to the three priorities detailed above, for our students are never just students; they are the present and future of our communities, society, and world(s).