Teaching Philosophy - The Art of Process

The central pillar of my teaching is to use reflection to develop a consciousness of the learning process. Becoming aware of each step of the learning process instills the foundation for life-long, self-motivated learning. Through reflection and the retropsective mapping of the journey taken, the learner can fully understand  what has been learned. 

I approach the teaching of writing and reading with the mindset of being a writer. I learned to be aware of the craft of writing most acutely through my creative work. Through my diaries and writing journals, I keep a log of my decisions through each stage of the writing process. My notes catalog those careful considerations and constraints to illuminate my thought process in shaping that final piece of writing. From these notes emerge something akin to the archetypical story of the hero going out into the unknown and returning with an item obtained after struggle; in this instance of writing, it is knowledge. I have translated insights I gained through my own reflection and philosophy of writing to my students to encourage them to become heroes of their writing process. As Mike Bunn writes in the essay “How to Read Like a Writer” (2011), learning to write is means understanding that all writing consists of a series of choices. As a teacher, I guide my students to consider the choices they make in their writing through the reflection process. By revisiting previous writings and older reflection entries, I draw my students’ attention to the narrative they have developed throughout the course: their journey to becoming a writer. 

Keeping a writing journal is essential in my courses. Once, after a semester had ended, a student emailed me to tell me that she considered her writing journal “like a memoir of the course.” I teach students to keep regular journals that they can shape into their own space of exploration, to litter their journals with notes and images — whatever they need — to bring their intangible thoughts from their swirling minds to the pages where they can begin to create order. Students use their journals as repositories of their research and their inspiration for their writing, where they may sketch out the outline of a draft; it is their space to express their frustrations at being blocked or record their successes. Teaching students to take control of the writing process and give organization to their thoughts is powerful and incites me to teach writing. Students begin to learn how to use their voice as they see themselves as writers. 

Typically, when I begin any of my courses — regardless of the discipline — students start with a prompt for their writing journal. These prompts may be a question I pose, or I may give students the liberty to write what they want. The prompts that I pose are targeted to either respond to something that we have just completed — whether it be to reflect on a draft that they have recently written or a reading that we discussed earlier in the week — or the prompt may be assigned to prepare students to think about what we will do in the class that day, or to prepare them for another component of the curriculum. This exercise aims to center students in our course together, to draw their focus to the class I will begin to teach. Just as we “get ready for work” and “get ready for going to bed,” I believe students need time to get ready for class, and these exercises in writing prepare the students’ mind. 

However, these prompts do more than just this. These timed prompts (of about 5-10 minutes) encourage students to practice a habit of writing: the more that they practice, the more fluent they become, and the more confident they become in expressing themselves. Finally, these prompts concentrate on the themes of the course, which I adapt to my creative writing courses as much as to my compositional courses, of what it means to be a reader and a writer and what it means to create one’s theory of writing. These prompts record throughout the semester their journey as a writer. I ask them to consider in different ways their methods as writers. Students revisit, revise, and reshape their ideas and definitions about writing. They look back at the trail of cookie crumbs their prompts leave and review who they are as writers, as much as evaluating who they are as individuals. They see, as much as I do, their progress as writers through assignments that evaluate the mastery of writing techniques. They began to think critically about themselves as writers and evaluate their works on the merits of their strengths and weaknesses. They begin to consider the series of choices they make in their writing. This practice of reflection was most succinctly addressed by one of my students, who wrote in their journal: 

Through the writing process, which is grounded in reflection, students create a map of their learning process. It is common in my courses that students finish the semester with newly-founded confidence and a more concrete understanding of writing and who they are as writers. They develop an appreciation of the writing process, discovering that the journey is part of what it is to learn.  Many students approach me after the semester to tell me that I helped to re-invigorate their appreciation for reading, or as this one student wrote, the class “made me fall in love with reading and writing all over again.”

However, like any journey, this one, too, is fraught with anxiety. I remind students that the act of writing is unnatural and that understanding its process will be a life-long endeavor. Writing is inherently painful. One is alone with immaterial ideas that must be reconstructed in the real world. It takes time. It takes intimacy with oneself. In a world where perfection and the ideal are perpetuated, I remind students that it is through imperfections and failings, we can learn and better ourselves. I tell them that their first drafts should never be perfect; their first draft is only the first step toward that final work that will showcase the best work they can do at this period of their lives. 

Writing is an intimate process, and it requires being understanding and accepting toward oneself. I guide students to think critically, not only about the content of the course but to think critically about themselves in relation to the world. Additionally, asking students to be fair toward themselves is an extension of how I ask them to behave with their classmates during workshops and peer revisions. I teach students that to get critical feedback on their writings, they must also give in return. Ultimately, we are helping each other to become better writers. I incorporate this shared understanding of our classroom community through a closure activity at the semester’s end: in a circle, each student shares out loud a challenge or success from the course. As we navigate the circle students realize they were not alone in their struggle and congratulate each other on their achievements.

My approach to instilling empathy in my students is through infusing creative writing, such as fictional literature, graphic novels, and poetry, into the course content. I use fiction in my

compositional courses to demonstrate narrative structure as well as to show that to tell stories is to be human. With graphic novels, I have found that students connect their learning to their world while acquiring visual literacy skills (an ability to understand meaning through images and use drawing as an expressive medium). I also use poetry to illustrate to students the necessity of careful word choice considerations. If we omit creative texts from our writing composition courses, we leave students ignorant of the humanistic values of literature. By using literature, students find power in creativity. I can see they channel their passion into their projects when they ask me if they can go beyond the expectations of the rubric.

In one of my research and English as a second language courses, a student wrote to me:

I am a writer who loves to teach writing. In my courses, I use reflection assignments to urge students to think more introspectively, and I use creative writing to encourage students’ imagination to take root. In my journey of teaching, I have learned (to paraphrase the writer Khalil Gibran) that to be a teacher is to guide students toward their path of learning. Through writing and reflection, my students learn how to look back so they can begin to look forward.