TEACHING CONTENTS:

Teaching Philosophy
Course Rationale
Course Progression
Student Assessment
Sample Paper
Sample Grammar Revision

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            If one were to track down Ole Millson, my chief rival from high school, I'm sure he would report that my career as a college professor proves that universe is inherently unjust.  After all, if the world worked the way it was supposed to, a guy like me would never have been able to get into a good college, let alone go all the way through to a PhD and several full-time professorships: I was suspended from high school in my final semester, hung out with the shop kids at lunch instead of my fellow AP students, and was the only person in the Top Twenty of my high school who had no idea what his GPA was.  That I'm a mildly dyslexic English professor just adds insult to injury: to him, I should have joined the Army or accepted a managerial position at the local Pizza Hut instead of becoming "Dr. Hal."  I didn't act like all the other college-bound kids—and I didn't deserve to be there in his book.

            When I first started teaching college composition, I was barely 22, and the ink on my BA from William and Mary was still wet.  I had no idea what I was doing despite the six-week training course West Virginia University required of all it's incoming "Teaching Assistants," their euphemism for "You aren't actually assisting anyone: it's your class, and you are on your own."  When I think back on that first year teaching a 2-2 load while carrying a full-time schedule of graduate course work, there was no time to think of what my teaching philosophy was.  My inherent advantage, though, was that most of my students at WVU were a lot like me and my high school buddies rather than the folks I went to college with: middle-class, first or second-generation college kids, some of whom knew what they wanted from school, but most just going along with the flow, doing what their parents or their high school guidance counselors told them to do. When I spoke, they heard someone from their own world talking to them, not a tweed-wearing professor stereotype, and that sense of connection broke down a lot of the subconscious resistance to the professorial voice, allowing us to learn together.  I got through that first year of teaching because of that connection and a lot of luck, and I started to develop a set of classroom skills that would allow me to survive as a TA at Lehigh University when I transferred the following year.

            Because one of my areas of specialization at Lehigh was composition theory, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to delve deeply into pedagogical theory, but I was very much surprised that my first major conscious thought about the educational process and my role in it came from Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educational Underclass, a text by UCLA educational theorist Mike Rose that is equal parts pedagogical treatise and memoir.  In one of the most poignant autobiographical passages, Rose recalls a moment from his high school years when one of his fellow blue-collar students declared, "I just wanna be average" in response to an angry teacher's complaint about the boy's indifference to his homework (28) The moment shocked Rose's younger self, who wondered why anyone would set out to be mediocre, and to me it pointed out the difference between my academic success and the "failures" of my high school friends who went straight into the labor force right after graduation.  They were simply trying to keep their heads down, not stand out, and avoid either humiliation at the hands of their teachers—many of whom felt their students were not worth the effort. Average was good, in theory, because they weren't doing that bad, it didn't require a lot of work, and their folks were just fine with C's.  I, on the other hand, had two remarkable parents: a self-taught genius for a father, who finished his BA after I was born as part of his successful bid to rise from a private to a captain in the US Army, and a first-grade teacher for a mother, who was part of the first generation of her family to work her way through college and graduate.  Their examples were always there in front of me, with the family reading books at the breakfast table or talking about what we learned around the same table over dinner at night.  My parents never stressed grades when they talked about my schoolwork: they cared about the concepts I was forming in response to what I was learning.  Instead of working hard because of potential punishments or rewards for report cards, I was driven to learn so I could defend my ideas at the dinner table, an internal motivation that separated me from both my shop class cronies and the grade-grubbing kids that sat around me in AP History.  The challenge for me as a college educator was to find a way to help students find the same kind of passion for learning that had helped me.

            Years later, I was able to use the vocabulary of Albert Bandura's social learning theory to help articulate the shift I wanted for my students: to move away from extrinsic motivations (rewards and punishments) to intrinsic motivations (internal satisfaction not derived from outside forces).  For most students, regardless of the level of educational institution, extrinsic motivations drive school behavior: I will work hard on my grades so my mother will buy me a car/ to avoid being beaten by my father / to get into a good graduate program / to get my credential so I can get a job.  While all of these motivations have legitimate value to the individual's quality of life and should not simply be dismissed outright, if they are the only motivational factor, any learning that takes place may fade as soon as the extrinsic force is removed from further consideration, much the way some students forget information almost immediately after a test.  Intrinsic motivations, though, inspire deeper retention: the student who takes pride in the skills they are learning for their own sake or can apply them in meaningful ways to topics or situations that matter to them personally master those skills more fully and with greater long-term retention.  The challenge professors face is to develop a classroom environment that fosters intrinsic motivations for learning despite the extrinsic forces inherent in formalized instruction: grades, academic progress, certification, and graduation. 

            One way to help foster intrinsic motivation in our students is to hold them to very high standards.  Rose argues that "students will float to the mark you set" (26), a concept that some faculty, particularly those faced with underprepared students, forget. When students sign up for a college class, they face two competing desires: the lazy desire for an "easy" class where they can simply pass by showing up and the hope for a true "college" experience that challenges their skills and intellect in meaningful ways, helping them to grow and be worthy of the label "college educated." Students who get a passing grade in the blow-off course may brag to their friends that they didn't have to work hard, but they don't feel the sense of pride or growth that students feel when they pass a course with high expectations, and they don't actually gain the knowledge or skills that they came to college to get.  In my own department, my very public criticism of a popular essay topic that asks students to write out instructions for Marvin the Martian on how to cook a grilled cheese sandwich has been met with defensive hostility, but students know when a task is not college-appropriate. A student in the LAL brought me such a paper and in frustration asked, "Am I still in sixth grade?" I didn't have the heart to tell him my mother gave a similar assignment to her first grade students.  Those faculty members who give the assignment defend it by citing the need for students to learn how to write a process analysis, but they forget that the skill should be combined with a meaningful, college-level topic, one that challenges the students not just to master the skill, but also to stretch their intellectual wings.  My own students write process analyses in order to defend or condemn a particular educational practice, and the fact that they are writing about an issue that directly affects their lives invites them to take the task more seriously.  The increased intrinsic interest in the topic, in turn, invites them to meet the high standards for technical issues like format, grammar, audience expectations, and style.  The higher the expectations held by the instructor, the higher the quality of student learning.

            Unfortunately, high standards alone are not enough: the greatest challenge to any educator is to help students overcome passivity and become active learners.  While some students are naturally passive, the majority of them are conditioned by their educational experiences to embrace passivity.  As Paulo Freire describes so eloquently in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, too many educators talk at students rather than with students, expecting information to be accepted passively and without comment.  Questions or attempts to apply information to students' real-life concerns or desires provoke negative responses from such instructors, who may feel that their authority is being challenged, that the students lack the expertise to manipulate the information, or both.  Faced with such responses, students adopt passivity as a survival strategy, one that not only limits their education to purely extrinsic motivations, but one that encourages passivity far beyond the classroom into the workplace and in civil discourse.  To counter this passivity, Freire proposes a "problem-posing" method of education, one in which students and instructors engage in active dialogue, becoming "teacher-students" and "student-teachers" in order to make learning and skills acquisition relevant to the students' own reality (61).  In such a learning environment, the teacher introduces information and basic skills instruction, but students immediately are invited to question the ideas, to apply the skills to real-life situations, and to modify, challenge, and evolve the class content in new and more useful ways.  Students take ownership of learning by participating in the overall creation of understanding: their comments or methods of application may open up new options for both the other students and the instructor, creating a community of learning that almost requires active participation.  In such an environment, the extrinsic become intrinsic, and more active learning thrives.

            Towards that end, I have developed a series of core beliefs that I apply to each of my courses:

            1.  Students need to have academics demystified. While students should respect both the expertise and experience of their instructors, professors often seem like completely alien entities far removed from the lives of their students by virtue of their education, professional personae, and power over their students.  I challenge this view by constantly code-switching in class from teacher-speak to the vernacular and from intense intellectual enthusiasm to laugh-out-loud humor.  By sharing parts of my personal history (my learning disability, my high school suspension, my poor showing my first year of college), they can further relate to me specifically, but more importantly, they can begin to see that despite whatever challenges they may face, they, too, can go far. Coupled with lively class discussions in which I take their ideas and counterpoints seriously, students begin to see that their intellect and beliefs have value, and nothing makes them happier (or more intrinsically motivated) than when they see their ideas shifting my own position, effectively teaching me to see an issue through their eyes.

            2. Students must learn to read actively.  Students often come to us without useful reading skills, one of the core activities of college and an essential part of active learning.  I demonstrate and then require students to annotate all readings for my courses, and I physically examine their texts every time reading is assigned.  These annotations, in turn, are linked directly to key class activities: the majority of essays assignments require the use of textual evidence, which, to their surprise, is easy to locate once a text is annotated.  Class discussions likewise depend on annotations: any claim made about a reading must be accompanied by a page citation that the whole class can then turn to and read for themselves.  Over time, students develop their own methods of marking texts efficiently for their purposes, which in turn opens up deeper levels of critical thought.

            3.  Students need to read challenging texts. Following the philosophy of David Bartholomae, one of the leading composition theorist in the nation, at least once a semester, I assign a "Plus-One" reading to my students: a text that is at least one level beyond the majority of the class' reading level.  That text, in turn, becomes the theoretical lens for a paper assignment, so students need to master the reading, even if it seems incomprehensible during the first read.  As a group, we decode the reading, spending several classes discussing what it means and how it is written.  The process helps strengthen their individual and collective ability to think critically and then use complex ideas to support their own claims.  The exposure to advanced writing styles likewise opens up new options in their own writing, often adding a layer of sophistication to their individual styles.

            4. Students need meaningful writing tasks.  In addition to providing students with college-level writing prompts that demand a high degree of technical proficiency and intellectual argument, my writing assignments generally invite students to discuss an issue or a text in ways that are directly relevant to their own interests or daily lives.  The challenge is to help them to move beyond personal narrative as the sole means of discussing issues related to their lives, but once they do, their academic voices merge with the passion of their personal belief in the underlying argument to create stronger writing.

            5.  Students benefit from extensive feedback from real readers.  Students in my courses do not write in isolation: they share their texts digitally via the class discussion board, and they actively participate in peer reviews with at least two other students on each major paper.  By learning to give respectful feedback about the strengths and weakness of other people's writing, my students learn to identify potential issues in their own writing. In addition, I meet with each student twice during the semester to discuss a draft in progress, giving the student and his or her work my undivided attention for 15 minutes each time.  Students actually watch me read and mark up a text, see my facial expressions as I am reading, and then discuss with me what works in the paper and what could use improvement.  Combined with minimal marking to indicate the presence of an error without directly correcting the error, the student leaves with a great deal of information about how effectively he or she fulfilled the writing task, and that information, in turn, often leads to a more successful final draft.  Graded papers, in turn, receive a typed one-page, single-spaced note discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the paper, as well as my personal reaction to the underlying claim, and then students have the option to rewrite the paper based on my comments for an entirely new grade.  This degree of feedback helps my students to understand that writing always has a real reader, one affected by the quality of their argument, their organization, their grammar, and their style. 

            Ultimately, my role as professor is three-fold: I need to create a learning environment in which the student can see themselves as part of an intellectual community to which they deserve to belong, I need to help shift students from passive to active learners with strong intrinsic motivations, and I need to engage them in meaningful academic tasks that increase their knowledge and skills sets while helping them to grow personally and intellectually.  That, to my mind, is the job, and it's a mission I gladly accept.

Works Cited

Bandura, Albert. “Self-Efficacy Mechanisms in Human Agency.” American Psychologist 37.2 (1982): 122-147.  Print.

Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.”  The St. Martin's Guide to Teaching Writing. Robert Connors and Cheryl Glenn. 3rd Edition. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.  408-421. Print.

Freire, Paulo.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 1970. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos.  New Rev. ed.  New York: Continuum, 1993. Print.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educational Underclass. New York: Penguin, 1990. Print.