Teaching Statement
[This is my Teaching Statement. In higher ed circles, it's more commonly known as a Statement of Teaching Philosophy.]
A couple years ago, I came across a quote from A.S. Hill, a Harvard professor and early forefather in the teaching of writing. In his 1880 book Our English, Hill writes that the job of writing teachers is not to help writers “hide poverty of thought in ‘finish’ of style”; rather, their job is to “interest his pupils in what they are writing so deeply that they put their best selves into their work.”
I have it taped on my desk, where I can see it every day.
The idea of the writer who finds his or her “own voice” is a cliché, to be sure; it springs mostly from workshop classes in which students have already been privileged with that idea in the first place. But more often that not, it’s been my experience that, for a variety of reasons, many students are not privileged with that confidence.
One cornerstone of my pedagogy, then, is to give students the confidence to “put their best selves into their work,” to convince students that to use their own words and draw from their own experiences and frames of reference is a good thing. In the classroom, I raise the more primary questions: Is what you have to say important? Should you write from your own experience? I tell my students that learning these lessons myself has been a crucial part of my own development as a writer.
To get there, I stress to students that what’s happening in the reading and compositional process springs, depending on the stage, from a conscious act of thinking or an unconscious synthesis of what they’ve learned along the way. This reminds me of another quote I have on my desk, this one from Jonathan Swift: “When a man’s thoughts are clear, the properest words will generally offer themselves first, and his own judgment will direct him in what order to place them so they may best be understood.”
I try to make each class an active, engaged event. I see my ideas of teaching through the lens of a practicing writer and editor, one who has written books and articles and works with other writers, and tell my students that I am in the same boat as they are, that I go through the same writing processes they go through. I tell them to find examples in their own lives that help illustrate a paper’s thesis or creative work. I tell them it’s OK if they don’t understand a passage of a text—as long as they try to explain why this is the case in their writing. This leads, I think, to more closely examined texts, sharper critical essays about what’s being read. Better creative work, too, comes out of this process.
Two teaching stories come to mind that demonstrate this. A couple of years ago, I was teaching a writing class at Parsons School of Design. It was my first time teaching this population of students, and it seemed all of them had been told at some point they were not “natural writers.” This lack of confidence showed in their rather anemic first drafts of papers on William Carlos Williams’ poems. I realized design students think in images first, then words. For the next round of drafts, I assigned students to sketch portraits of their working theses. Students came in with flowcharts and shapes, elaborate thought-drawings, all of which gave students the confidence to talk in front of the class. For many of them, to start from their visual skill sets was a breakthrough in getting to their own, original ideas. In another class, discussing Emily Dickinson to a class of music students at The New School who had trouble transcribing their thoughts on paper, I mentioned the rather infamous observation that all Dickinson’s poems could be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” It just so happened a student had her guitar, and an Emily Hootenanny ensued: students took turns singing poems to fit the song’s structure. What we learned is that those church hymn structures of Dickinson’s are not that simple at all, that meters vary, and a poem’s sounds slap up against each other. The drafts and creative work reflected that deeper understanding.
It’s these kinds of classroom moments that send me dancing down the hall, knowing that both teacher and students have done their job.
Whether in creative writing or in more transactional and expository writing, I’m a big fan of using exercises. From constrained writing to counterintuitive or ridiculous writing prompts, from list-making to collaborative and web-based projects, all of these help students worth with their ideas and put them on paper, be it a poem or a formal essay. I offer myself up as someone who will help demystify and humanize the material as much as a motivator, explainer, and standard-bearer of the moment. I take great pleasure in the writing process; it’s my strong belief that students should, too.
It goes without saying, then, that I run a democratic classroom. We work in groups and in pairs as much as a whole class. Although I don’t shy away from offering lectures to present information, I also want the students to have the feeling that, at any given moment, they may have to get in front of the class as well. My best-case scenario in each class is there will come a point where I will, in effect, have to get out of the way and let students do their work.
My student-centered pedagogy sits side by side with my aesthetic as a writer who doesn’t ignore today’s world, but rather, directly engages with it. It’s my hope that the critical and creative skills students learn in my classroom will help in their intellectual and practical lives, no matter the field, after school. And in the process, by “putting their best selves into the work,” they will have learned a little more about themselves.
