STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY :: LITERATURE
It follows that if literature is never produced in a vacuum, then it should never be taught or studied in one either. This basic principle has led me to identify, at the intersection of the various ethical and epistemological philosophies that inform my teaching of literature, one fundamental responsibility that motivates and shapes my teaching practices: to teach my students how to recognize and construct meaningful questions. My primary pedagogical motivation is to help my students gain and refine the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills they need to formulate constructive questions about the texts they read and also about the information they access, the decisions they arrive at, and the culture they help build.
It is my firm belief that writing itself is a method of inquiry into the world at large, so that any study of literature must similarly be founded on inquiry. Throughout the course of a university education, my students will come into contact with a countless number of texts; while it is my job to teach a certain number of these, I think I can best serve my students by coupling the information I give them about the literature we study with training in how to ask the kinds of questions about a text, historical period, cultural network, political context or philosophical paradigm that will both allow them to and demand they be responsible for the knowledge they acquire. If I can teach my students how to ask and develop relevant, logical and insightful questions about a series of texts, then I am not only teaching them the literature of a given period or genre, but helping them acquire a dynamic and critical skills set they can use in their other classes, across disciplines, and in their daily lives.
To further this goal, I strive to maintain a constant balance in my lesson plans between how much time I spend lecturing and how much time I leave for student questions and discussion. Depending on the goals of a particular class, I will guide class discussions or organize controlled group discussions, both of which are frequently founded on developing, analyzing or responding to questions. I encourage students to ask questions about their colleagues’ observations as well as mine, which makes for active and challenging discussion, and requires that both my students and I remember that we are responsible for the content, point of view and intellectual integrity of what we express.
I also, for example, ask that my students turn in a weekly series of five questions that they have formulated from material offered up in lecture or from the reading. These questions may vary in length and complexity, but I require that each student develop one of them more fully, either in an attempt to answer the question, further complicate it, or reflect on the possible historical or social ramifications the question provides for. I ask that students post the question they have developed further each week on our course website so that their peers can see the kind of thinking they are doing; I have found that this contributes greatly to a sense of cohesiveness among students and stimulates dialogue that often takes unexpected and exciting directions. At the end of the term, they compile their weekly questions to use as a study guide and to keep as a compendium of the kind of thinking they have undertaken since the beginning of the course. This record of intellectual curiosity allows my students to gauge for themselves the development of their own thinking as well as the increased skill, complexity, and comfort-level with which they are able to make inquiries into the texts they read and, by extension, the world around them.
These questions – as well as the ones they develop and consider in class, in their scholarly essays, and on exam questions which require they “show their intellectual work” – serve as proof of their ability to engage not just with the literature studied during the course, but indeed any text. And if I can help my students trust themselves to do that, then literature becomes a way into the world as well as a world worth exploring.
