Statement of Teaching Progress

However, like many people reckoning with the realities of white-body supremacy, I’m finding that my pedagogy must do more than “include” students: it needs to become what bell hooks calls “a practice of freedom.” I’ve tended to perceive my students primarily as learners and to consider my role as a teacher in terms of their learning: how can I best support students’ learning and growth? However, I know that this limited perception of my students (as learners and little else) is born from my own privilege. It’s impossible to leave our identities “at the door” when we enter a classroom space, even though so much of current pedagogical practice seems assume we can. This is a problem.

I’m in the process of developing better ways of both encouraging students to express their intersectional identities in conjunction with their role as learner and allowing myself to be a learner in a diverse and inclusive space in conjunction with my role as teacher. And, even as I’ve revised (and continue to revise) many of my course materials, I know that I must continue challenging and resisting the white-body and -language supremacy embedded within the structures of higher education and especially within the writing classroom where it’s much too easy to police students’ linguistic habits.

In working toward this goal, I seek to apply intersectional approaches to Universal Design for Learning (UDL). I continue to use rhetorical tools and models to help students identify, categorize, and troubleshoot the writing challenges they encounter in my class.  For example, when students are developing paragraphs for an analytical essay, we apply the “levels of generality” model to diagnose how ideas that are too specific or too general can obfuscate the point of a paragraph. When my upper-level students are introducing the significance of their research in grant proposals, we use the “novelty moves” (an adaptation of Swale’s CARS model) to discern the most effective way to articulate the proposal’s contribution. Each of these tools is flexible, and I work to demonstrate for students how each tool can be adapted to different audiences, genres, and contexts.

 These rhetorical tools, however, belong primarily to the realm of “academic discourse”—ways of thinking, doing, and being that have emerged and evolved alongside the needs, values, and habits of the Western academic community. Because these needs, values, and habits are neither universally “correct” nor equally accessible (or desirable) to all who may be tasked with performing them, I build into my courses space and time to question, reflect on, challenge, and resist the foundations of academic discourse.  For example, in my first-year writing course, we begin the semester with Jamila Lyiscott’s TED Talk, “3 Ways to Speak English” and discuss how and why some forms of English are valued more highly than others. When we practice thesis statements, we consider how the conventional location of a thesis (i.e., the end of the introduction) in an academic essay, as well as the very existence of a thesis (i.e., a clear, direct statement of the text’s main take-away), is the product of a value-laden, culturally situated, and historically durable discourse community.  We articulate what some of those values are—clarity, brevity, and novelty, for example—and consider how these values may function to exclude people. 

We put this critical insight into practice by creating new “artifacts”— prior academic essays redesigned into a new mode or medium—that better reflects our “voices,” speak to a particular audience, or convey a message more effectively than a conventional academic essay. Students have created podcasts, dance performances, poetry, and films to articulate a message in a way that purposefully diverges from academic discourse.  I also invite students to use their prior experiences and interests as points of entry into larger issues and frequently ask students to analyze their experiences as inventional case studies. For example, in my first-year writing classes, students analyze a personal experience in “failed” advocacy and connect their self-analyses to larger social issues and problems. The level of engagement, even excitement, students bring to these activities and assignments has convinced me that education as a practice of freedom must value who students already are when they enter the classroom and what the already bring to it, not just what we want them to take away at the end of the semester.

 A statement of teaching philosophy tends to demand that we have figured out and can articulate the best way to be a teacher. However, teaching is nothing if not a continuous process of revision. In my ten years teaching college-level rhetoric and writing, especially after a few incredibly challenging academic years, I’m finding that my pedagogical philosophy must be based in inquiry: questions, learning, growth, repeat.  For this reason, I offer not a statement of teaching philosophy but one of teaching progress: this is where I’m at right now. And the next time I sit down to articulate these thoughts, I will hopefully be asking better questions, recognizing different problems, and exploring more innovative options, all of which maintain a commitment to accessible, inclusive, and anti-racist pedagogy.