Sorry for the hiatus. I have no real excuse. But I am back. This term I am taking our department's pedagogy course. I wanted to share some of my work as teaching is really important to me. I have not done much of it, sadly. I got my first tutorials this year, and they have been a bit of a whirlwind. I love every minute of it, but I am also barely swimming sometimes. So when it came to our first assignment for pedagogy I had a hard time. We were asked to writing a teaching philosophy, and it was not as simple as I thought it would be.
I have thought about teaching for years, but I have only tried to articulate it in aphorisms and horrific metaphors. Of course, I want my students to engage critically. I want literature to mean something. But when trying to state exactly what I meant by that I found I had no words. I did some digging (also part of the assignment) to find other teaching philosophies. I particularly liked this one from David Clark at McMaster. But finally I went to In The Middle (I should have just went there first), and Mary Kate Hurley proposed an interesting idea. She tried to imagine a medieval model for her pedagogy. So I used her proposal to get my philosophy started. I am still not happy with it, but I think it is a great start. Enough preamble, I leave the rest for you to decide.
Your humble author.
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O you possessed of
sturdy intellects,
observe the teaching
that is hidden here
beneath the veil of
verses so obscure
- Dante, Inferno
IX.61-3 (trans. Mandelbaum)
Reading is hard. Dante leads himself through the whole divine cosmos just to teach this
simple lesson. The
obscurity of Dante's allegory,
even his choice of allegory
itself, points to a very interesting pedagogical strategy - reading. He does not tell his readers what to think, rather he asks them to think
for themselves. He demands
that his students critically engage with the text and, in doing so, interpret it. As a
teacher, I always strive to do the same. My goal in every class is to teach my
students to read in this Dantean sense. I want them to explore the figurative
terrain of the text and not just vaguely grasp its topology, but rather dig
underneath. I want them to explore, to seek a fuller, more intimate knowledge of the
literary. I may be a teacher
of literature, but first, I was a student of literature. As such, I strive in
my classroom to give my students access to the same teachers that taught me
---Spenser, Donne, Julian of Norwich, Chaucer, and, of course, Dante.
I often tell my students there are two approaches to reading
literature: the Oprah's Book Club model and the literary scholar model. Of course, there
are a multitude of ways to read, but this over simplification helps to get
across a point. For Oprah and her book club, reading is something we do in our
spare time. It is a hobby. In
this type of reading, the text is a means towards our own ends, a kind of
literary therapy. I tell my students that this can be a very fun way to read; I
indulge in it myself all the time. But for literary scholars, the texts must take
the lead. They all become our own individual Dante's helping us through their
terrain. I spend much time on the formal aspects of the text, showing my
students how the text structures its concerns. I like to begin my courses with an extensive
model of close reading. I will pick two or three lines of poetry and show
students how much we can get out of those lines. I continue to model this
process throughout the course.
Modelling,
however, is never
enough. I also have my students fumble through the text themselves. My students
are asked to take risks, to trip, and to even fall down in their readings of text. To read in this way, students
must feel that they can
make mistakes. I am a very demanding teacher, and I recognize how this could
stifle this learning process. Students will not want to take risks if they
believe that I will punish them if their final product is not successful. To
assuage this, I emphasize the importance of the process over the product. For
instance, I always give my students the option to send me drafts in advance of
a deadline. I have them meet me in office hours to go over the drafts, where I
can help them work out the problems of their papers before they are marked. This
allows them to take risks, but without major consequences. I also give students
examples from my own undergraduate and graduate papers. I ask them to critique
and edit these samples. They quickly learn that while I expect the best from myself and from them,
I also know that we all fail at perfection. Showing my students my own
fallibility allows them to be more comfortable with their own. Reading is
hard, and it is important that my students know that even I am trying to master
it (and will continue to for the rest of my career).
I want to treat my students as intellectual peers, sharing in the classroom
experience. I will often ask them
questions that I do not know the answer to (and I will let them know this as I
am asking). Perhaps this points to the more optimistic side of my
teaching. I believe that all my students are
capable of being A students, even if in reality, they will not be. This does
not mean that I teach
all my students in the same way. Everyone
learns slightly differently, and as such, I must tailor my approach to give each the potential of being
their best. In the classroom,
I will give students many options for engaging---through presentations, group
work, written responses, and discussion. I bring into the classroom visual aids
and often read poetry aloud. I also offer my students as much one-on-one
time as the course permits. I encourage students to use my office hours, to
send me questions, and to run essay drafts by me. I never want my students to
think I am not available just because we are not in the classroom. I hope most
my students will learn more outside of the class from reading the texts than I
could ever give them. I just
want to equip them with the right tools to get the most out of their
explorations.
More importantly, I want them to be changed through their
explorations. Here Dante and I agree and disagree. We both think texts have
formative powers. He is a bit more prescriptive that his texts should effect certain types of
individuals. I, on the other hand, would never to want to decide how my
students change. I just believe that an engaged encounter with literature is
never one way: we are redefined as we interpret. Derek Attridge articulates
this in his The Singularity of Literature: "In the reading of the
writing that is literature, one might say, meaning is simultaneously formed and
performed. The words mean, and at the same time they show us what it is to mean.”[1] As
Attridge starts to outline here, literature, if we are reading properly, is a transformative
experience; I want to give my
students the critical tools to have this experience. Specifically, I
want literature to help them
gain a sense of context and meaning for their many identities and thoughts that they have been developing
throughout their lives. When I have to conceptualize who I am, such as what
kind of teacher I am, I have a wealth of texts and authors who I can consult,
who have helped to give my thoughts definition. My goal in the classroom is to
give my students the tools to read texts in this way. I want them to ask those
big, impossible questions, like who am I, and have Dante to guide them through the unending process of
finding an answer.
