Teaching Philosophy Sample

My writing pedagogy is informed by the social constructivist approaches to writing put forth by George Hillocks, Jr., which assumes that social interaction facilitates writing education. Following Vygotsky's theory of “zone of proximal development,” Hillocks offers that teachers must invent gateway activities that bridge the gap between a student's prior knowledge of a subject and higher levels of learning needed for students to meet course objectives independently. My teaching methods seek to facilitate this process for students, while engaging them in creative, interesting ways, whether in the first-year composition classroom or the upper-division writing course.

I have been teaching computer-mediated composition courses for four years, including OU's first-year composition sequence, English 1113 and 1213, Technical Writing, and Authoring in the Information Age. One technology that I have used to enhance student learning is BlackBoard's Discussion Board function. Weekly, I assign students topics to write about and have them post prior to our Tuesday class meeting. The listserv allows students to read one another's work, which extends learning beyond the traditional classroom, creating a virtual one. Also, students have responded to one another at length, and in great depth, communicating with one another often when I gave no assignment. The continuation of these conversations outside of the traditional classroom creates a collaborative atmosphere that carries over into our face-to-face meetings. Of course, there are potential dangers to this approach, such as flaming, but the benefits are worth the risks I believe.

Another of my initiatives is not only to apply particular technologies in my classroom, but also to complicate students' assumptions about these literacy tools. For example, I open English 1213 with the comparative evaluation paper in which students are given a scenario, determine the larger issues of the scenario, and find two websites that offer potential research for those issues. They then evaluate the two sites and compare their results. I like this unit because it introduces them to online research in a more complicated fashion than simply showing them search engine sites; they begin to understand issues of authority, objectivity, accuracy, and currency of digital (and print) information. Later papers (proposal and causal essays) have shown much more forethought by students with regard to their online research. Issues surrounding technology are also the basis of the proposal and causal essays, as students argue the “reality” of the Internet, cyber ethics, etc., and how the deployment of particular technologies are affecting disciplines in which students are interested.