My teaching is, first and foremost, informed and guided by the ways with which I live, and through which I relate to humans. These ways affect my relationships with students to be based on respect, understanding, compassion, and love. I believe that the time of largely hierarchical relationships in the classroom has long passed and given place to more approachable teacher-student dynamics where the teacher no longer gracefully imparts knowledge to students while sitting in his armchair but acts graciously as an empathetic guide or mentor who walks side by side with students along the way and this is the type of relationship I strive to build. Aside from my interactions with students, I try to establish an environment in the classroom where respect and friendliness among students is highly emphasized, so that they can safely express themselves without the fear of judgement.
At the core of my teaching philosophy is the students’ right to their own dialects and vernaculars. This view is, to a large extent, informed by my training in Linguistics where prescription of standard and correct use of languages is discouraged and dialects, vernaculars, and accents are not only accepted for what they are but also welcomed and celebrated for bringing variety to the ways humans communicate and for being more representative of the different and subtle ways that meanings and connotations are conveyed.
An essential aspect of teaching writing is to understand where students come from and what their comfort levels with writing are. For example, many students that I teach in WRD 110 are freshmen coming straight from high school where writing assignments are boilerplate and have similar prompts for all students. At the outset of the course, I ask my students to describe their relationship with writing and talk about the hope, fears or concerns they have about the course and writing. What I predominantly observe is the lack of confidence in their abilities to write and produce a “good” piece of writing. They also usually complain about their enormous difficulties with writing, and when investigated, it usually stems from their lack of interest in the areas they were made to write. They also, in many cases, seem to be confused about the writing process and report not having the “writing bone” in their bodies. In response to the anxieties of these uneasy students, I leave it to them, as part of their writing projects focused on inquiry and critical analysis, to find an area that they are interested in and passionate about and frame their writing projects around them. The way I model this is through Catherine Savini’s four methods of writing in which students are encouraged to notice and identify problems within the communities they are a member and stakeholder of and motivate them to start from there. The natural interest they have in those identified topics drives them to research and write about them. Throughout the process of identifying problems and developing research topics/questions, I give them feedback aimed at refining their writing goals and asking the right questions that can inform feasible and meaningful writing projects.
I also dedicate a considerable portion of the first class explaining to them that writing is not a talent that a group of gifted individuals possess and the rest of us don’t. It is a skill that needs to be developed through practice and a joy that needs to be found. To break through their fears of writing, I assign low-stake freewrites and explain to them that these stream-of-consciousness writing assignments are fair game and they can assuredly write without the fear of looming deadlines, judgements, and grades. After years of harboring resentful feelings towards writing, I find a reconciliation period crucial to any progress in collegiate writing.
The goal that I try to fulfill in my classrooms is to help students rectify their misconceptions about writing, restore their confidence and find a level of joy in writing by ensuring them that their products are valued and their perspectives are cherished, as they are the only ones looking at the world from those perspectives and what they produce is a gift to those who read them.
