Philosophy of Teaching

At the forefront of my teaching philosophy is a deep belief in the need to encourage, cultivate, and develop investigative states of mind in students. Before critical analyses and meaningful composition can happen, students must understand and agree to the value of questioning a text. By asking questions of imaginative texts, while being guided by an instructor to develop and extend those questions, a student is well-situated to actively contribute to their discipline’s discourse and participate in knowledge construction. Learning to value thinking inquisitively, rather than declaratively, about literature assists students in achieving meaningful and productive critical engagements with printed texts and beyond. By foregrounding the practice of inquiry in a literature or composition course, I hope to endow students with an improved ability to analyze future professional or personal situations and act upon them through language. While the ability to produce competent and thoughtful literary analyses is indeed a central aim of any English classroom, my approach to this goal is one that attempts to promote compositional exigency and maximize the transfer of analytical skills to other critical situations, disciplines,and/or professions.

How to go about encouraging students to embrace the art of inquiry, and in turn the status of “noviceship” as described by Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak in Writing across Contexts (2014)? In order to achieve a loosening of the critical rigidity of outcome-oriented, problem-solving students, I seek to create a heuristic instructional environment focused on critical and compositional processes grounded in real rhetorical situations, what David R. Russel terms “activity systems.” In addition to instructor-generated questions, students are encouraged to generate individual, interest-specific ways of questioning the required reading, an initial activity that encourages self-reflection (what am I interested in?) student ownership of the course, and critical exigency. Content of class discussion is then largely student-generated, often centered on a course blog in which all students contribute. My role as an instructor is to facilitate by providing additional ways (often in the form of additional questions) for students to develop and extend their original observations of inquiries. Further development of student inquiries takes the form of various discourse activities, each one increasing in complexity, that the student will undertake throughout the course. Ideally, students will be able to tailor their work to their career goals by developing an academic argument which utilizes an interdisciplinary approach (for instance, a student interested in pursuing a law degree might explore 19^th century notions of legality). Students will identify and research a problem that is meaningful to them and take on the role of the academic reviewer by analyzing the arguments of their sources. A writing-as-process approach is emphasized as students submit writing pieces in stages, engage in peer-workshops, and one-on-one student-instructor conferences. Since creating exigency is key, in addition to submitting their final project to me, students will also submit their work to a secondary outlet of their choice, be that an undergraduate writing contest, an extra-departmental community such as the George Eliot Fellowship’s annual essay contest, peer-reviewed journal, or another interdisciplinary outlet, pending instructor approval. Ultimately, the goal in my course is to get students to engage with 19^th century texts in a way that is meaningful and productive for them and for the academic community at large.

By engaging students in acts of inquiry, discussion, and discourse, I hope to foster a sense of critical agency that each student can benefit from in future coursework as well as professional situations. I find working with imaginative literature is especially conducive to the cultivation of these habits of mind. The 19^th century is a great time to study how people think through written discourse, as the novel form was in the process of being refined and legitimized during this time. The various ways in which novels make arguments for themselves as legitimate, indeed artistic, forms often have much to do with how a certain texts are positioned within a larger cultural situation. Often, the questions we ask of texts, we might also productively ask of ourselves: How am I representing a certain cultural aspect in my own writing? To what extent do I competently incorporate other voices into my writing? What are my own critical axioms? Value-judgements? Ideologies? Epistemologies? Ultimately, a course that builds analytical skills will also encourage students to utilize those skills on themselves in structured moments of self-reflection and self-evaluation. In the meta-cognitive spirit of Walter Pater, one must “know one’s own impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctly” if one wishes to truly see the world “as it really is.”