For my philosophy statement, I intend to
reconceptualize and revise my teaching philosophy statement. Within that statement, I’ve currently
identified three areas that form the triad of my teaching goals:
1.
Relevance: “Relevant education is
provided when students can articulate how to incorporate what they have learned
into their professional careers and personal lives. It often takes great
effort to help students understand why certain acquired knowledge is relevant
to them, but I fervently believe that it is worth the extra effort if it means
that the knowledge will be used in their future rather than forgotten after the
next exam.”
2.
Education vs. Indoctrination:
"My efforts are aimed at teaching students how
to think rather than what to
think. It is impossible to anticipate
the various moral, ethical, and even technical realities our students will
face, even in the near future. To be
prepared to navigate these realities, I give students tasks with increasing
complexity, helping them build their confidence at each step.”
3.
Expansion of Worldview: “I push
students to critically examine long-held and cherished beliefs about race,
ethnicity, gender, religion, and social class. When I am able to guide
students to recognize their own belief systems, rather than simply acting on
them by instinct, they can begin to ask themselves critical questions about the
merit of their ideas. . . Students are inundated with new information
presented in a seemingly objective manner.
Helping students break down the walls of the appearance of objectivity
to evaluate the value structure that undergirds all communication is an
expansive perspective.”
In reviewing this triad, I still hold the
principles dear but to say that they remain unchanged after my own educational
experiences in this doctoral program would be contrary to my own stated value
system – I value education for its worldview -expansive potential. Therefore, I
am moved to reevaluate and incorporate all that I am learning.
There is clearly a classical Sophistic
influence in my teaching philosophy that I will continue to explore but I also
see influences from more modern social constructionists and critical theorists,
such as Burke, Perelman, and possibly even Foucault. I’m
looking forward to exploring this more as I delve more deeply into this
assignment and of course, receive feedback.
I enjoyed reading your ideas, Casey, about your plans for your assignment. The terms you are focusing on--relevance, education/indoctrination, and worldview expansion--are three that I try to focus on, myself. In some ways it's immoral to teach students unless we help them determine how to apply their learning; this is why I really like problem-based learning (PBL) and andragogy (the art of teaching adult learners). I have long been interested in differences between convergence and divergence, too, and strategies for giving students room to tackle ideas in my class without brow-beating them to think in certain ways. And as you know I'm trying hard to teach students how to embrace diversity through acknowledging difference and similarity through ideas related to glocalization. I think you can see these things in my own teaching in this course. The idea with a good teaching philosophy is just that--that readers should really catch a glimpse over exactly what it is you value as a teacher, why you do what you do, etc. Very nice connections you're making, Casey. I hope that you are able to see what some professors are trying to do in our own program in these ways, too. While still surface level, for instance, our look at Eastern Rhetoric is a start in our course. Have you found key thinkers for each of your three areas which you might bring in to support your case?
ReplyDeleteI have a book chapter I fairly recently published that may be of interest to the line of thinking that I had when making this assignment. It may be useful to skim as you massage your thinking on this assignment. See the second chapter of http://wac.colostate.edu/books/eportfolios.
ReplyDeleteThank you! Just downloaded it! This will be very helpful to clarify and further my thinking!
DeleteCasey, I enjoyed reading your post and it looks like you have a great direction for this assignment. While I don't teach, I have been a student for a long (long) time and I think your goals are attributes I would ascribe to many of my best teachers. I particularly like your thoughts on expansion of worldview. Teaching someone to overcome the appearance of objectivity will serve them well.
ReplyDeleteI look forward to seeing more about your philosophy statement.
Hi Casey. I'm glad that I read your post this week. I really like how you are focused on teaching students to think for themselves rather than thinking for them. It seems that you are truly practicing a scaffolding approach to your instruction and the students will benefit greatly from that approach. Students don't learn anything from following a prescribed template except how to conform to a structure. I find that students can really appreciate the rhetorical situation much more if I ask them to conduct a genre analysis on sample documents and then come up with possible structures based on their observations. Looking forward to reading more!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Casey, for commenting on Indian students' blog posts and thinking about differences between our rhetorical moves. Students there need to focus on issues surrounding the canons of rhetoric, in particular, as well as the appeals.
ReplyDelete