Teaching Philosophy

   I’m a writing teacher because I believe that writing and—its flip-side: reading—are at the core of being a fully developed human being, are primary keys to expanding the mind.   Thus, teaching people to write well is nothing less than helping them to become the best people they can be.  It's a fundamental act of social change.

   Of course, changing the world for the better depends on knowing what is as well as what's possible.  Much of those kinds of knowledge comes from reading.  And, in the writing classroom, writing and reading are fundamentally related:  if you are teaching either of them well, you are necessarily teaching both.  For the more a reader understands about how a writer has structured and developed, styled and strategized her work, the more the reader  understands both what s/he is reading and  how effective writing is created.  A given course, naturally, will put more emphasis on one or the other of the pair, but it is a mistake not to teach both. 

   Of course, to discuss how writers learn about writing from reading other writers is to focus on writing as rhetorical and/or artistic creations.  Undoubtedly, the rhetorical and the artistic—communicating the ideas, information, and arguments of the world and representing the world aesthetically—are, indeed, extremely important aspects of writing that students must understand.  However, writing is also a private act through which one’s intelligence articulates and develops.  Thus, I believe that while the many of the artistic dimensions of writing may not need to be presented in academic and civic situations, the transactional/rhetorical and the exploratory/developmental dimensions almost always come into play and so must be taught and developed in students. Consequently, all of my courses teach both transactional writing and exploratory writing (with a nod given to aesthetic dimensions whenever possible).

   My approach to teaching comes out of my belief about the nature of learning:  I believe that learning is an act of social construction.  That is, you learn by individually constructing your understandings within social contexts that give you perspective about your constructions, enabling you to modify and develop them.  The implication of this theory for teaching is that students need to work on their own and in small groups where they can seriously and systematically discuss their work, their ideas and interpretations—comparing, arguing, collaborating, revising, extending, modifying.  Thus, my class activities and assignments constantly alternate between individual and group work.

   Learning to write well and read well, in social construction theory, is about developing as a student, as a learner—but more than that, it is about becoming a strong citizen, an astute, contributing member of society.  

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