Statement of Teaching Philosophy

While I am concerned with issues like grammar and style, as a teacher I am primarily interested in whether or not a student demonstrates an understanding of good paper structure, logical reasoning, and critical thinking in his/her work. This focus on content encourages students to really think about what they are saying in their papers and what sorts of methods of arguing will be most effective to prove their theses. In her article “The Composing Processes of Unskilled College Writers,” Sondra Perl shows how destructive a focus on grammatical mistakes can severely inhibit a student’s ability to write. By making things like grammar and lexicon secondary, I leave students free to concentrate on understanding the topics and tests that they have chosen to analyze. There are three core concepts that are fundamentally related to my main belief in the importance of placing the quality of ideas first:

1. I believe in teaching critical thinking and argument through writing.
2. I believe in teaching ways in which literature is connected with the other humanities.
3. I believe in facilitating group discussion to engage students with the texts.
   

While the skill of writing is valuable for its own merits, I also believe that it should be used to develop critical thinking and argumentative faculties. Logical arguments are the foundation of all good papers, for what else is a thesis other than a statement of belief that must be effectively supported. I challenge students to truly think about the meaning of a topic or a work of literature in order to draw appropriate conclusions that are of their own making. Explaining the importance of choosing proper sources and detecting bias are also key to my lectures.

It is important that students understand the connection between literature and history, philosophy, art, and music because making those connections serves two very important functions. Knowing what sorts of things influenced and inspired writers and their audiences gives students a richer, more holistic understanding of literary works. An interdisciplinary approach also helps each student to see how literature is important in a broader sense. Instead of feeling like novels and poetry are not important because not every student will one day become an English major, they can see how literature fits into the cultures of the past as well as their own. Since I have training in studying history, I primarily take a new historicist approach to teaching literature. My lectures are about half centered on grounding the student in the culture of the authors we are studying and half in discussing the literary works themselves.

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Group discussion both makes the student feel responsible for the reading and helps them to begin thinking about what a work of literature means to them. It also develops the kinds of skills they will need for close critical analysis of texts, which can then be applied to their papers. They have the opportunity to voice their ideas in an open forum as well as to benefit from the variety of ideas voiced by their classmates. In this way, instead of entirely feeding the class a text, we discover the text together.

“The mediocre teacher tells. The good teacher explains. The superior teacher demonstrates. The great teacher inspires.”
– William Arthur Ward