User:Steph/teaching philosophy

From UMassWiki

The pedagogical question is, how does one support students as they learn how to learn on their own?

Much K-12 public schooling focuses on the skills necessary for the job market. This means most students arrive in college well trained to attend to what they think their teacher wants. In large lecture classes, reading the instructor's personality doesn't figure in so much (here we go with basic memorization and easily quantified measures of knowledge), but in smaller discussion-based and skills-oriented classes a student's success may hinge on how well they read their teacher. I consider it my primary task to break students of this habit of channeling their educational efforts along assumed instructional parameters.

Promoting such critical thinking doesn't usually come easily. Students (like most human beings) resist new paradigms, especially when the energy required for change is in competition with other imperatives (earning an income, finding a mate, etc.) I've found that making myself vulnerable to the pressures of change, growth, and learning assists in cultivating an environment with high standards, mutual respect and acceptance, and tolerance for disagreement and argumentation. The classroom is one of the few places where people with real cultural and political differences have the opportunity to engage each other in serious communicative interaction.

I believe the most important contribution I can make is to participate with students in creating an environment in which everyone gains confidence in determining which aspects of self, at which times, are most relevant and necessary to deepening our engagement with each other and the world. Every course presents a central theme around which interaction is structured. The topic and the knowledges associated with it establish a reference point that anchors and, in certain important respects, predetermines the boundaries of intercourse. Cross-disciplinary and inter-subject miscegenation is typically discouraged. Rules of the academy, just like the rules of public education, encourage conformity and acquiescence to social structures that originally elevated and have upheld western societies. Recognizing this fact does not necessarily invoke an attack, however uttering it (or similar sentiments) often elicits various defensive reactions. This is the precise boundary where the skills of critical thinking are absolutely vital to the continuation of the democratic precepts western society professes to honor.

Teaching from this boundary is risky. Trying to create an environment that allows all persons present to find their own way to balance on this boundary, to immerse themselves in its zones of uncertainty, can be unsettling or even frightening. Sometimes I fall off. Sometimes students wobble. Each event, whatever it is, offers possibility. The success of this pedagogy can ultimately be measured by the chances we choose to take with each other.