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Statement of Teaching Philosophy
The literary
theorist Mikhail Bakhtin once said that “the most creative work of a
culture takes place on its margins.” Bakhtin was referring to
literature, but it seems to me that his observation applies equally well
to the classroom. To borrow freely from Bakhtin, I believe that the
most creative work of a teacher takes place on the margins as
well—on the margins and across borderlines.
Sometimes those margins are quite literal. One
of my standard teaching spiels comes soon after students have had their
first reading assignments. I ask them to hold up their books, and I
show them mine. There’s usually a striking difference. Mine is the
special teacher’s edition—the one with my scribbling in the margins.
Theirs are usually blank in the margins. I tell them that we typically
remember only about 30% of what we read—but that you can double that by
doing something active, even something as simple as underlining key
points, and responding with objections and summaries in the margins. The
lesson, of course, goes beyond mere note taking. The point, I say, is
to read actively, to participate in the act of reading, to become
engaged with what you are studying, to cross the boundary line between
student and object of study. In a nutshell, that is what I aim for in
all my teaching.
I also let my
students in on the great secret of teaching—that the best way to learn
something is to teach it. Students teach by participating in
discussions, conveying to one another their assessments of what they are
reading, helping each other hone their writing skills. Participation in
class is another way of moving from passive reception of knowledge to
active engagement with it. My role is to get them going, show them the
way, provide the necessary equipment.
I remember early on
in my teaching career making a mental distinction about the difference
between high school teachers and college professors. Teachers teach
students, I thought then, and professors teach their subject. I
remember too overhearing a remark at a conference: “The truth is, we
teach ourselves.” My sense now is that the truth is some combination of
all these. Perhaps a geographic metaphor will help explain (and help me
return to the idea of margins!). The students in my class dwell in a
space of the known. It is comfortable and familiar. I know of another
place, the space of my subject—whether it be the structure of an
evaluation essay, or the style of Annie Dillard’s writing, or the
pastoral elements in a Hemingway story, or the cultural implications of
contemporary literary theory—and to my students that space is the
unknown. My function is to lead them there, across the border into the
unfamiliar. I have to know my way around there, which means I have to
know my subject. In essence, teachers draw maps their students can
follow. But I also have to know my students, and be willing to engage
them, and that usually means finding innovative ways to present
information. So teachers are not just mapmakers, but guides as well.
On the path we take in each other’s company, we can show our students,
by our enthusiasm and excitement and curiosity, that the journey is
worth taking, that satisfactions and rewards come all along the way and
not just after we reach some destination called a test, or a job.
Partly what I’m
saying is that the boundary lines between teaching and learning need not
be unyielding. I urge students to be involved in the process so that
they are teaching themselves and each other through their engagement
with the subject. And I want to model for my students the process of
active learning. I frequently focus readings in my composition classes
on nature—a nice broad topic that students of any major can relate to.
Much of the information in our readings concerns biology. Occasionally
students express surprise that an English teacher is curious about—even
gets excited about—something other than language use. Another sort of
margin that I want my students to explore, then, is that space between
academic fields. I urge my students to make connections, to find ways
to make their bits of learning from different courses fit into a
pattern, to see that what we learn in, say, physics ties in with
literary theory, or that aesthetic appreciation may have some basis in
evolutionary biology. This is teaching as ecology lesson. I’m reminded
of John Muir’s line about the interconnectedness of all living things:
“When we try to pick out anything in the universe,” he said, “we find it
hitched to everything else.”
Another boundary
that I try to get beyond is that formed by the walls of the classroom.
There is something to regret in the way our culture segregates the
process of education. We give it its own space, a bland, confining,
restrictive space, and all too often our students thereby learn the
unfortunate lesson that what happens in that classroom has little to do
with what happens in other classrooms, or with the world beyond the
classroom. How do we move beyond those boundaries? It can be as simple
as taking class outside on a sunny day—and delighting in the fact that
our students may be distracted by the call of a bird or the wind in the
trees. (Be grateful they still notice!) Or it can happen by bringing
in a guest speaker (I have brought in writers like Pattiann Rogers and
Marcia Bonta), or by setting up a class list-serve (as I did in an
honors section of English 180), or by viewing a film outside of class
time, in a dormitory conference room, with pizza (as I do regularly in
my composition courses). And it can happen by assigning students essay
topics that require them to find out something about the world out
there. In several classes, too, I have compiled a selection of the
students’ best work, put a nice cover on it featuring a student’s
artwork, and distributed it to members of the class sometime after the
end of the semester. This gives them something tangible to represent
the class’s efforts—and it’s something they are proud of. The fact that
the collection gets to the students after the end of the semester
reminds them (I hope!) that the skills they’ve learned in class are
meant to endure beyond the end of the semester.
It is in the spirit
of these ideals that I have helped develop some innovative courses at
Penn State. Along with Robert Burkholder, associate professor of
English at University Park, I developed and proposed English 180,
Literature and the Natural World, a general education humanities
course. And along with Dinty Moore, associate professor of English, and
Carolyn Mahan, assistant professor of biology, both colleagues at
Altoona, I developed, proposed, and taught an “Outdoor Experience Block”
in the fall of 1999. This team-taught, interdisciplinary block, which
included English 180, BiSci 3 (Environmental Science), English 50 (Intro
to Creative Writing), and a one-credit freshman seminar, featured
experiential learning through three extended field trips. In addition
to studying the academic content of the courses and exploring
interconnections between those courses, students visited, among other
things, a biological research site in eastern woodlands, a rattlesnake
restoration site, a glaciated pond, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater,
and salt water marshes on the Chesapeake Bay. The students also went
hiking, backpacking, canoeing, and rafting, thereby (we imagine)
learning lessons of both self-reliance and team-building. I also
co-chaired the committee developing an interdisciplinary environmental
studies degree program at Altoona, a program which incorporates many of
the kinds of boundary-crossing ideals that I mention above (field trips,
emphasis on interconnections between academic fields).
I don’t mean to
suggest that good teaching takes place only in the margins or
beyond borders of various sorts. In any subject there is a core of
knowledge that still needs to be imparted. And I still hold the
old-fashioned belief that a good test can be a learning experience. But
more and more I believe that our most memorable lessons are those that
occur not just when we pass on knowledge about our subject, but when we
make the effort to find ways to engage our students, and impart
something of ourselves as well.
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