Teaching Philosophy

In *Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment*
Peter Elbow says that “good writing teachers like student writing” and “good
teachers see what is only potentially good; they get a kick out of mere
possibility” when looking at student writing (Elbow 406). As a teacher I
believe that this is the core of what it is to be a teacher. As a teacher, much
of my time is spent responding to my students’ needs and their writing but It is
important that while I may be focused on recursive writing and genre usage in
my day to day pedagogy I always keep in mind that my students are still
developing as writers and it is my job to foster their growth instead of
viciously stamping out only the inadequate parts of their writing. I should take not of the possibility hey represent as new writers. I should
encourage them, in my written responses and our discussions in class, to pursue
the things they are good at – even while highlighting where their work fails to
express their ideas and can be improved. This means that my pedagogy should
always be sure to point out where students succeed as much as where they fail.

On a more technical level I believe that it is important
for me to teach my students two things above all in my composition classroom.
They need to gain an understanding of the writing process as recursive and they need to learn about the
ways that genre functions in the texts they read and write. In order to foster
such learning, I plan to focus on teaching what Anne Wysocki describes as and
understanding of genre through teaching “a better integration of form and
content and of text with context” (Wysocki 582). By creating lessons which focus
on teaching a dialectical understanding of writing (studying where and how form
and content influence each other as well as where a text's context can define
these things) I plan to help students to develop an ability to understand
how texts are written and how a recursive writing process incorporates this
dialectal process into their own writing. As such, I will ask students to
analyze multiple texts (which bend genre through alphanumeric and visual
techniques) with an eye toward how each text uses the genres it chooses. Students
should be instructed on how to read genre in other texts before being expected
to incorporate those moves into their own writing. As the semester moves
forward students will be able to take small writing tasks that asked them to
analyze texts and apply what they have observed and learned to their own writing.

To show students a writing process that is continual and
developmental I will expect them to transition ideas from each project to the
next with multiple steps of revision in between. Early low stakes writing will
provide the generation of content which can become the focus for longer, more polished,
projects which will ask that they perform academic research – teaching them to
write in the academic genre – as well as shifting their work into multiple
genres for a final project. As students shift from one genre to the next a
proposal and drafting review process will ask them to reflect on what they have
said before, how it was defined by the genre they were working in, and how
shifting to their new chosen genres might change that.

Much of my own work has been steeped in a dialectical
understanding of the form-content relationship as discussed in Fredrick Jameson’s
*Marxism and Form*. While I will avoid
asking student to directly tackle such a text I cannot avoid the influence that
this work has had on my own scholarship and how I conceive of writing. In his
book, Jameson says that
“change is essentially a function of content seeking its adequate expression in
form” and “form is itself but the working out of content in the realm of the
superstructure” (Jameson 327-29). I hope that I can help my students to
understand some of this idea as they shift their work into new genres. By
asking them to not only reflect on the work they do but stretch and shape it
into new a new form, thereby changing their content, they will be acting out
the concept that Jameson discusses. A final portfolio assignment will shift the students’
work into yet another new form at the end of the semester – putting all their work in
conversation with itself – and allowing them a final reflective moment for the
class. This reflection, an understanding of genre, and the ability to shift
their work between genres effectively is at the core of my conception of
teaching.

## Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. “Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting out Three Forms of Judgment.” College English, vol. 55, no. 2, 1993, p. 187., doi:10.2307/378503.

Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form; Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton, N.J. Princeton UP, 1972. Print.

Wysocki, Anne. “THE MULTIPLE MEDIA OF TEXTS How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media.” What Writing Does and How It Does It: an Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices, by Charles Bazerman, Erlbaum, 2009, pp. 123–163.