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Statement of My Teaching Philosophy
and Practices
I believe that meaningful learning takes place
when students integrate domain learning - acquired knowledge about
a particular field, whether "British Literature Since 1800,"
"The Indian Novel in English," or "Post-War British
Literature and Culture" - with the kind of analytic skills
that will serve them beyond the boundaries of the classroom. Each
of my courses invites students to take an active role in their
learning and aims to foster a sense of literature as a culturally
significant form of expression. Because I also believe that literary
significance varies across a range of contexts, I strive to make
my classroom an environment in which students challenge each other
in ways that highlight the stakes of competing interpretive communities,
situations, and values.
When students negotiate and evaluate overlapping,
even discrepant cultural contexts - spanning the high and the
low, the local and the global, for instance - they become better
readers and writers. My classes demand of students a great deal
of reading and writing, but not solely for its own sake; strong
textual preparation also fosters collegial exchange and collaboration
in the classroom. Indeed, one of the primary goals of my courses
is that by the end of the semester students come to think of each
other as colleagues in a shared intellectual enterprise. To this
end my syllabi offer an array of written assignments (experiential
narratives, sociocultural reports, book reviews, close reading
exercises, online web exhibits, and seminar papers) and classroom
activities (discussion, collaborative work, lecture, and student
presentations) that encourage students to imagine a range of audiences
and situations for their written and oral analytic work.
As the chief instructional audience for this work,
I enter into dialogue with my students about their writing not
only through extensive written responses but also in individual
conferences in which we continue classroom discussions, pose questions
to each other, and work on compositional and critical problems
together. Yet I am rarely the only audience for whom my students
write. My classes feature prewriting activities, writing workshops,
and Web-based bulletin boards in the Blackboard environment. The
latter in particular afford students the opportunity to engage
with the texts and with their colleagues' arguments before we
enter the physical space of the classroom, and it encourages students
to consider each other as primary - and significant - audiences
for their writing.
Students are explicitly the central audience for
the research forums or miniconferences I frequently organize toward
the end of semesters, in which students present their projects
to the entire class and solicit feedback in the form of critical
questions, requests for clarification, and constructive comments.
From the expository writing classroom to the graduate seminar
in the history and critical practice of cultural studies, I require
students in my classes to put their growing interpretive and critical
skills into practice in research projects that explore texts and
contexts that interest them. Students prepare for these projects
by engaging regularly in written responses designed to foster
close-reading skills, on one hand, and to hone contextual and
holistic thinking about texts and their relation to other texts
and contexts, on the other. I also encourage students to revise
their writing because I believe strongly that for students to
master the material and to develop their critical thinking skills,
they need to rediscover, reassemble, and reconsider their own
approaches to the texts they read; they also need opportunities
to refine their writing skills and practices. This is no less
true in the graduate seminar room than in the first-year writing
classroom: all of my classes emphasize collaboration, textual
analysis, and contextual exploration, and students who are working
toward increasingly sophisticated research questions and projects
especially need to cultivate strong writing and revision strategies.
Because the courses I teach find their places
within a general humanities curriculum, I believe that my role
is to lead my students to think critically about literature in
a variety of textual and cultural situations, not only the situation
of a single poem, novel, author, or period. I strive for my lectures
and our class discussions to model both sustained attention to
the formal complexities of texts and a contextual form of thinking
that evaluates textual interventions across a range of cultural
settings. I frequently introduce visual art, examples of contemporary
cultural production, and documentary sources when my classes discuss
texts from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and I integrate
the materials we read with examples from contemporary high and
popular cultural forms. I encourage students to do the same -
in their BlackBoard postings, in our classroom exchanges, in their
oral presentations, and in their formal written investigations.
I work in my classes to demonstrate the relevance
of historically distant texts and ideas to contemporary cultural
situations, and I likewise encourage students to consider such
texts in the terms of their own writing and culture. Students
in my modernism classes are required to analyze such popular and
"highbrow" periodicals of the modernist period as The
Little Review, The Dial, The Nation and the Athenaeum, Punch,
and The Times of London, and think about them in relation to contemporary
media. And, for instance, when we discuss F. T. Marinetti's "Futurist
Manifesto" and its impact on Wyndham Lewis's Vorticist movement,
for instance, I invite students to think about the ethos of the
popular film Fight Club as bearing the traces of Futurist aesthetics.
But the context-rich forms of analysis that characterize my classroom
are not always immediate or familiar to students; in fact, in
courses in contemporary British, African, and Indian literature,
I ask students to read regularly in online editions of daily and
weekly papers from those regions to begin to build a sense of
context - and of the kinds of analytic questions appropriate in
that context.
Ultimately the interdisciplinary materials my
students and I bring to bear on our primary texts represent problems
for us to solve collaboratively in the classroom and in our writing:
What is the relation of text to text? Text to context? Context
to context? The careful posing of such questions enables us to
cultivate an integrated learning community, one in which broad-ranging
communicative, interpretive, and critical skills are just as important
as an understanding of texts as rich formal constructs that are
situated socially and historically and that perform significant
cultural work.
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