Teaching Philosophy

Cauthen

Teaching goals, of course, vary depending on the individual student; my overall attempt is to engage every one of my students -- not continually, which is impossible, but consistently enough to give each of them a chance to succeed and to convey some of real pleasures of intellectual work.

I believe the writing teacher must integrate a theory of language with a theory of learning. My own theory of language learning is derived from Chomsky's ideas of the innate human ability to master a native language, and more importantly, the innate human desire for language creativity. My pedagogy begins and ends by drawing on this desire, and attempting to heighten it. Unfortunately, we also live in a degraded semantic environment, in which fifteen percent of the average two-year-old=s vocabulary consists of brand names, and in which we must each day struggle to build, as Bakhtin says, the "independent, responsible, and active discourse [which] is the fundamental indicator of an ethical, legal, and political human being."

I find Bakhtin's work useful for several reasons. First of all, it accurately conveys the social nature of writing while retaining individual agency on the part of writers (and teachers) -- it does not minimize the effects of our semantic environment on us, but it also allows (in fact, demands) us not to yield to these effects. Second, through the concept of heteroglossia I am able to mitigate the problems that Bartholomae cites in "Inventing the University"; that is, I'm able to demonstrate to students that they are already fluent in not just one, but many languages, and that fluency in academic discourse is different in degree but not in kind. Third, the concept of a continual interplay between centrifugal and centripetal forces serves me as a reminder to provide both structure and flexibility in the classroom. Fourth, Bakhtin's work describes dialogism as not only an epistemological but also an ethical imperative, one that I think is vital for teachers, and that I will discuss further below. Finally, Bakhtin's work describes, for me, how actual writing works in most disciplinary discourses: we draw upon various other voices (including the anticipated voice of the audience), orchestrate these voices, provide social cues through genre, and think of each individual writing as never finished but part of a continuing conversation (which is also why I use formative instead of summative valuation of student writing).

Regarding the actual activities of the class, I see my overall pedagogy as essentially Vygotskian -- continually setting the bar a little above the individual student can accomplish alone, and then organizing class activities to allow her or him to hurdle the bar, then resetting it. This involves a good deal of collaborative work as well as one-on-one conferencing, but primarily it involves a good deal of assessment, so I can determine what the individual student's Zone of Proximal Development might be. To accomplish this I often use small group discussions, noting quality of individual participation, and frequently read informal student writings. I think that required regular participation in a class listserv -- which I encourage the students to think of as a collaborative journal -- helps me both assess individual student's abilities and helps students begin to teach one another.

But I do not want to overemphasize formal theories. For me, the real interest of teaching lies in its rhetorical essence, in its requirement that I continually assess and adjust the relations between students (the audience), the discipline (the subject matter), and myself (as well as the University that I represent). Honoring my obligations to all three of these is not always easy, but it's not supposed to be; that's where the interest and the challenge lie. I find a teaching journal to be most useful in working through this challenge. I like to think of my journal using Louise Phelps's idea of the practice-theory-practice curve; that is, I attempt a particular pedagogical move, assess in the journal how it worked or why it didn't, and use this theorization to plan my next set of practices, which I will also theorize upon, ad infinitum. Again, that this might make teaching seem a Sisyphean endeavor doesn't bother me, but in fact encourages me.

Finally, I strongly believe that a course is not about what I as the teacher know, but what the students can come to know. At the beginning of my teaching career I conducted myself as Jane Tompkins, in "Pedagogy of the Distressed," said she had: I put on "a performance whose true goal was not to help the students learn but to perform before them in such a way that they would have a good opinion of me." I reassessed this situation by reading Tompkins, by realizing that my students tended to learn more on days when, for whatever reason, I had not squared off the corners of what I was going to let them know in that session, and by following a very simple piece of advice from Dennis Hall, the Director of Composition at Louisville: "Tell 'em." Tell the students what you're doing and why you're doing it; give them your major ideas about the material up front, so that the major mystery of the class isn't "when will they get it?" (meaning "when will they be able to replicate my own ideas or tease them out of me?") but "what can we all do with this idea?" Since I've begun working in this way I've found my teaching to be more enjoyable and fruitful for both myself and my students.