Teaching Philosophy

One of the core values taught to budding digital humanists is experimentation—the willingness to engage with new topics and techniques in an iterative manner.

In my class, “iterative” is a powerful word. As an instructor, my primary expectation for my students is to progress their abilities wherever they are starting from. In first-year composition courses, which comprise of students of wildly different skillsets and backgrounds, this iteration may be as foundational as learning how to effectively break up paragraphs. For other students, this may be learning to move away from cliché hooks and experiment with winding narratives and descriptions that establish a tone and context which frames the rest of their paper.

Regardless, I believe that experimentation and iteration are foundational to the writing process. In order for successful drafting, revision, and editing to take place—where students are not afraid to take risks and try new strategies in their writing based on instructor and peer feedback—it is important that students feel that they are in a setting where experimentation can take place. To foster an environment of experimentation, I deliberately build my course content, structure, and assessment around the idea that students are engaging in new practices.

In terms of content, I often focus on the internet and cyberspace as cultural phenomenon—having them analyze niche, academically undervalued subjects like internet aesthetics, YouTube video essays, and 2000s children’s virtual worlds to establish an understanding of how digital media that they take for granted shapes their cultural assumptions.

My course structure—inspired by my own (post)graduate experience—emphasizes “loosening the guardrails”—in other words, slowly taking away the scaffolding established towards at the beginning of the semester. Practically, this means scaling back on direct instruction—less lectures dictating what to do, fewer pre-specified topics, and reduced assignment instructions. This means students must use their existing knowledge, learn to discover and explore ongoing academic discussions, and determine their own expectations for what academic writing must be.

I understand that, for many students, this is a nerve-wracking process to move from guided to independent writing. Hence, I require my students to attend a brief one-on-one conference with me where we discuss the strengths and concerns of their paper together. This encourages their direct involvement with the feedback process, reassures many they are on track, and brings those losing focus back to where they need to be. These one-on-one conferences also have the added benefit of forming strong relationships with my students, which I have found to be crucial in order to deliver effective feedback.

Finally, I establish my course assessment to encourage the experimentation and writing process. In addition to a rough draft, conference, and peer feedback grade, I also build a revision grade into the final rubric. This encourages students—regardless of where they started in class—to work on their papers and make necessary changes to their papers rather than simply resubmitting a rough draft that is “good enough.” This ensures that most students, as long as they are demonstrating meaningful effort, can continue to progress in my course with a balanced ratio between the writing process and their final projects.

In my class—both for my students and myself—I believe reflection is critical. I want my students to not only understand what went wrong, but also how and why they need to make changes. In my ENG 201 class this semester, I am having my students model their reflections around David Kolb’s learning cycle, which I believe will be an improvement from the loosely guided reflections I required last semester. Once I have assessed my student’s reflective processes, I will reflect on my own practice and adjust as needed to best support my students’ learning.

This semester, one thing I found I needed to adjust based on student feedback was giving more concrete examples of real student work. While I provide instructor-written and real-world samples that match my expectations, my students felt that they were difficult to obtain and put into their own practice. In order to adjust this, I changed the parameters of their second essay to more closely resemble that of an assignment I taught in a previous semester. Because of this, I am now able to go through my former students’ sample works and highlight key rhetorical strategies they do in developing their argument—strategies my current students may find more accessible.

As a composition instructor, my goal is to establish an environment where my students feel that they can experiment and take risks in their writing. I encourage my students to iterate, to revise, and to edit, and I establish even in my syllabi that my courses, just like their writing, is an ongoing and developing process. I look forward to my continued teaching practice and seeing what I can do to continue supporting my students’ needs.