At UGA this semester I'm in the process of putting together a university-approved teaching portfolio, and one element of that portfolio is a teaching philosophy. Here's my current workup of that philosophy, and I hope my faithful readers can give me some feedback.
Teaching Philosophy
An unstated conception of teaching and learning is one beyond critique; thus for the sake of humility, I begin by agreeing with Wittgenstein when he writes, “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (Tractatus Logico-Philosphicus 5.6). Before one goes about changing one’s world, one ought to understand the shape and character of that world, and every subject’s interaction with objects happens through and with and in response to words and ideas and debates and traditions. Whatever else happens when a college professor teaches college students, the class’s vocabulary should grow, not only in words but also in concepts and categories. As an apprentice chemist learns the notations and categories that make up the chemist’s discourse through study and experiment, so a student of literature learns both the terminology with which the scholarly community converses and studies with a more experienced practitioner texts and other artifacts that the teacher decides might be worth studying. Both practices expand and refine vocabularies, hopefully to the end of shaping human beings as self-conscious and world-conscious intellectuals.
As vocabularies expand, practical disciplines anchor intellectual pursuits in embodied communities, a key for the humble appreciation of the discipline. My classroom is not a time and a space simply for lecturing and note-taking but also for moral formation, the kind of thing that happens when a coach teaches a player how to excel within the rules of basketball or when a practicing scientist mentors a laboratory assistant in the ways that the scientific community lives a scientific life. With English in particular moral learning must necessarily involve honesty at the level of research and composition but also extends to the ways in which a community asks difficult questions together, the practice of kindness as well as suspicion in reading texts, and diligence in adjusting one’s self and one’s vocabularies to the inquiry at hand. When I evaluate and grade a paper, my purpose is not primarily to communicate to graduate schools a student’s talent abstracted from the aims of the class but to let the student know where the next step towards competence lies. When we read texts together my aim is not merely to “problematize” conventional wisdom but to model and to develop those aptitudes that allow one to live well alongside and within complex situations (including those most complex of entities, human communities). Every incoming college class is in some sense a chosen class, those young people with the drive and ability to effect change for good. My classes always attempt to make small steps towards developing that class.
When a student leaves my classroom, I have contributed three months’ instruction to a life that spans at least seventeen years and often longer. Thus humility ought to inform my goals for students. In one semester a student in my English class ought to have a stronger grasp of critical and conceptual vocabularies relevant to the texts at hand. She should have practiced, at least for the span of one major project, those virtues proper to a truthful and diligent researcher and synthesizer of the scholarship available. Depending on the sort of class, he also should have at least a working familiarity with the spectrum of approaches that might lead to a good life in a world made more complex and some apparatus for evaluating those approaches. If the student reaches those things, then the person leaving my class will have partaken in the humanities, those disciplines that bring consciousness and ethics and imagination together for the good of a larger community.
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