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- Effective teaching environments create allow students the freedom to discover and advocate for themselves (bell hooks). They are driven by the curiosities and interests of the students.
- Students learn best when they take control of their learning and make decisions about their education including learning objectives and assigned tasks (Rick Stiggins).
- The unwillingness to approach teaching from a standpoint of race, sex, class, and gender is rooted in fear, and teachers cannot allow that fear to guide their pedogogical choices (bell hooks).
- Grades should reflect student learning and growth, not averages of points. Robust feedback and continuous revision policies help students focus on their learning progress (Robert Marzano).
- A teacher models their beliefs to the students in the classroom and in other spheres of influence.
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- Composition deconstructs the meaning of “writing” to decentralize the power of academia and empowers the writer’s government of content, structure, form, and style (Cynthia Selfe).
- Composition seeks to create an environment where students feel safe to question the attitudes, values, and ideas of themselves and others in order to engage in critical discussion about society and ethics (bell hooks).
- Composition reinforces the connection between writing, reflecting and learning by asking students to write and reflect regularly on what they know, and what they need to know, and how they can learn (Peter Elbow).
- Composition reflects on of the relationship between the writer, audience, message, exigence, and contextual factors and explores the consequences of changing any given factor (Cicero).
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- Online classes, like face-to-face classes, require a level of personalization and presence. Students connect to the instructor and to eachother only when the instructor leads by example in creating community.
- Online learner, while flexible, is not inherently more accessible than other learning modalities. A teacher must strive to know how to accomodate each student in their digital and e-learning literacies.
- Both teaching and learning online are more time consuming and challanging than attending a class. The labor on the part of the student and teacher should be reconized.
- Students deserve to see their teacher’s face and hear their teacher’s voice. Online learning is multi-modal
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- Multimodality is practical: It enhances the functionality of the composition and the rhetorical agency of the writer (Jody Shipka).
- Multimodality is fair: It increases the writer’s access to students’ available means–resources, audiences, proofs, and talents not often validated in traditional academic settings (Jody Shipka).
- Multimodality is diverse: It legitimizes unlimited forms of critical composition that extend beyond text-based genres while acknowledging the different skills writers may draw upon to make meaning (Cynthia L. Selfe).
- Multimodality is transferable: It requires writers to recognize the intersectionality of literacies across disciplines and sections of their lives (Michael-John DePalma).
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[av_toggle title=’Principles of Online Learning’ tags=”]
- Online classes, like face-to-face classes, require a level of personalization and presence. Students connect to the instructor and to eachother only when the instructor leads by example in creating community.
- Online learner, while flexible, is not inherently more accessible than other learning modalities. A teacher must strive to know how to accomodate each student in their digital and e-learning literacies.
- Both teaching and learning online are more time consuming and challanging than attending a class. The labor on the part of the student and teacher should be reconized.
- Students deserve to see their teacher’s face and hear their teacher’s voice. Online learning is multi-modal
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When we reinforce standard homogeny, we tell others how to measure themselves.
Hamilton, Missouri. Population 1,813. Quilt-town, USA. Where everyone is expected to go to church, attend football games, and extract wisdom from Romeo and Juliet read-alouds. Where JC Penney grew up, where he took inspiration from civil war uniforms to mass-produce clothing in standard sizes. Some people thrive in that, but others do not fit ready-to-wear clothing and curriculum.
I dropped out of high school the first semester of my junior year. While my commitment to learning helped me step on the bus every day, I couldn’t conform. I became estranged. My teaching philosophy stems from this estrangement. My identity as an outspoken, openly-gay female threatened everything my hometown stood for. I remember sitting on the floor in the counselor’s office in tears. Several college banners hung on the walls, and I thought about how I’d never make it to college. The path to college required passing through junior prom, then senior pictures, then graduation, and somehow a dorm room.
It has been a long journey figuring out who I am; I am winding in and winding out of various identities every day.
I am teacher. I am writer. I am student. I am queer women in heterosexual relationship. I am rhetorician. I am a wive. I am a dog mom. I am woman in the workforce. I am a first-generation college gradate. I am a quilter. I come from a long line of dairy workers.
Each identity faces different challenges expectations, but each contributes to how I learn and what perspectives I bring to the classroom as a teacher. My teaching allows students to take pride in their various identities and roles in their lives by asking them to examine themselves critically: how they value their literacy, what they want to accomplish, what communities they belong to, what they believe, what languages they speak, what life experiences have changed them.
Throughout my life, I’ve redefined my identity a number of times. I took on new hobbies and passions. I attached myself to new commitments or found myself in new states–new countries–new languages. But I do not think we know ourselves until we have had to face what we believe to be True. Students should question who they are.
We are not the job titles pinned to our shirts, nor the hobbies hidden under our beds, nor the accomplishments in our resumes. Our identity is constantly in turmoil because it is eventful and bound by the rhetorical moment, confined by fleeting audiences, and tethered to a particular cause or system of causes at any given moment. Each new situation in our lives calls us to adapt–play a different role, establish new ethos through discourse, relationships, and actions. It is difficult to write when we are out of touch with who we are.
I believe you cannot separate good writing from the self.
All writing should reflect who you are. I did not like my first-year composition classes because I thought the purpose was simply to practice writing. We wrote in three basic modes: analysis, argument, and exposition. My argumentative paper was over an issue I randomly selected. My analysis banal. My exposition disconnected from anything important to me. I did not understand how to select topics and genres that reflected the beliefs and interests important to who I was.
Every day, I ask my students to reflect on what they know about themselves: what they value, what they want, what they need. They select topics that explore their belief systems and write proposals within their communities. When students see how their writing connects with their daily lives, they begin to invest in the craft of writing as a tool for living. I ask them to research issues in their field of study, and I teach them citation styles specific to their majors because I believe a teacher’s first job is to help students be agents for themselves.
When we teach students how to meet our expectations, we are not teaching leadership and innovation. Despite what we know about teaching and learning, prevailing pedagogical models in the university reinforce a hierarchy that validates the authority of the teacher and invalidates the experience of the students. Students read what we tell them to read and write what we tell them to write, yet we complain when they do not feel comfortable to speak up in class discussions.
I ended this last semester engaged in a conversation with 20 freshman composition students who asked me, “why doesn’t school teach us what we need to learn to be successful in life outside of academia?” I could not answer that question. I could not explain why they still sit in rows and learn the same time-honored curriculum as their grandparents–one that teaches them few practical adult survival skills, nothing about their personal interests, and little about their intended careers. When I asked my students whose job it is to speak out for change, they told me they did not have the authority to have a voice. If student’s do not have the authority to speak about their experiences, who does?
My pedagogical philosophy creates a space where students are given classroom authority. Students select their own learning goals, build rubrics, lead discussions, and make decisions about due dates. bell hooks, American author, feminist, social activist, and teacher says highlighting student experiences without privileging our own “helps create communal awareness of the diverse experiences that may inform how we think and what we say…makes the classroom a space where experience is valued, not negated or deemed meaningless” (84). But we can only teach students to value their expression when we engage in dialogue with them and give merit to their ideas. I have learned that when teachers acknowledge the validity of students’ experiences and allow students to take leadership roles, the teacher also grows and learns from the varied perspectives.
To give our students the power of voice, we have to teach them make critical decisions for themselves. We must first stand beside them to help the discover what they want to accomplish (purpose), who can help them (audience), the obstacles (context), the opportunities (angle), and the importance of timing (kairos). We stop teaching them to write to assignment prompts and focus on writing to contingent rhetorical situations. We cannot pretend to know the future by teaching them skills they may never need. This approach renders us “incapable of saying anything pertinent or giving any counsel regarding the present” (Isocrates “Against the Sophists”). We can only teach them how to analyze their particular situation to make informed choices. If my students understand the stakes of their decisions–they are proud to take ownership of their actions. Nothing gives me more pride than instilling a sense of personal obligation in my students to do what is right for them.
But how do we teach them to live in a world full of contingencies and unknowns when we assess them by our set standards? While I have not figured out how to reconcile the tepid climate of institutional education and my disdain for formal grades, I fight for my students to understand that grades do not define them. Grades do not even recount what they know. Grades are a systemic and systematic way to categorize students and compare them against one another. When every student is different, grades teach them to define themselves on our terms–the terms of academia, the terms of bureaucracy and the terms of capitalism. It reinforces the false notion that some of us are better than others.
I fight for the true definition of assessment–a snapshot for the purpose of viewing the moving components of learning (Rick Stiggins). Sometimes students “fail” because they are struggling to work through their ideas, and I value that process.
- I spend massive amounts of time offering writing feedback and very little amount time justifying grades.
- I work hard to make sure their grades reflect their learning, and I offer unlimited opportunities for revisions.
- I encourage students to explain their decisions by any means possible rather than requiring needless tasks.
- I do not give Fs to students who come to class and turn something in–even if it’s just a sentence.
Reflection is the only true assessment that brings students a clear path to growth.
Finally, I believe I have the specific obligation to model my beliefs.
Teachers do not have to luxury of maintaining their authority simply for the opportunity to interact with students, not even for the ability to mold students into good readers and writers. Teachers must first be models in their beliefs and expectations. We do not have to luxury of separate personal and professional lives.
- I believe in the power of failure; therefore I must reflect openly on my failures in daily life and how I grow from them.
- I believe everyone represents the best version of themselves when they understand their position in time and space. Therefore, I must always question my position– my strengths, weaknesses, and authority at a given moment.
- I believe students grow from reflection and feedback, so I must create a classroom dynamic where students feel comfortable giving me feedback.
- I believe students should constantly remind themselves why what they are doing is worth their time. So I must never lose sight of why I am here–to love my students to greatness.