MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My teaching evolves with my reading of theoretical and practical texts, with my continuing experience with traditional and nontraditional K-16 teachers and students in the classroom, with my professional development activities, and with my growing awareness of work in other disciplines. There are some core values, however, that make up who I am as a teacher. For instance, in order to teach literacy, it is my view that writing teachers must expand students’ ways of seeing as readers and writers. As Patricia A. Sullivan suggests in “Charting a Course in First-Year English,” encouraging students to be “more active and reflective participants in the various cultures that comprise the world” is vital. To do this, students need to learn how to use both personal voice and academic discourse to convey knowledge to authentic audiences. They also need to learn how to use ethos, pathos, and logos to become savvy surveyors of rhetorical situations. Further, because of our society’s reliance on computer technology, students must pay attention to and become functionally literate with communication and presentation tools. Fundamentally, three ideas shape my philosophy:
(1) I believe in the value and power of language;
(2) I believe that flexible, effective teaching involves reflection, reflexivity, and action; and
(3) I believe in connecting students’ learning to something they know or value.
I work to help students recognize the value and power of language to make meaning in various subcultures. Meaning making is a social act, the process of getting an image from a writer’s head to a reader’s head. Assembling words into sentences and paragraphs requires a writer to organize concepts into a form that others can understand. It is in this act of assembly that learning takes place. Consequently, I prompt students to use writing as a crucial step toward comprehension. Students in my first-year composition courses, for example, write critical responses of different flavors to at least three class readings. They consider how their own literacy has developed and they look at the roles writing may play in their academic, social, and work lives. They reflect on their own experiences, interview others, and consult both primary and secondary research sources. My students also learn about language by writing about the activities they’re undertaking. They use peer, tutor, cyber-tutor, and teacher response to compose multiple drafts, and then they produce digital portfolios to interconnect learning artifacts and writing processes. This is the subject of my dissertation and action research. By Rich Rice.
By David E. Zitarelli
In summary, my teaching philosophy regarding effectiveness involves bringing a human element into the classroom to motivate the student to actively engage the subject outside that room. Beyond that, active participation in various forms outside the classroom can supplement gains made inside it. To maintain fresh and effective teaching, this process requires frequent adjustment and change, which are germane for Temple students because of the broad diversity of talents, backgrounds, motivations, and achievements they bring to class.
“Teaching procedures have
to harmonize with evaluative
theories. More precisely,
one’s philosophy about what
writing is for leads to a
theory of what constitutes
good writing. That
philosophy, in turn, leads to
a concept of pedagogical
goals, and the goals lead, in
turn, to classroom
procedures.”
–Richard Fulkerson,
Composition in Four Keys
