Teaching Philosophy
No matter what class I’m teaching, be it a fiction workshop or a composition class themed around mass incarceration, when I call attendance, I ask each student to answer a question: What were you afraid of as a child? What animal do you wish you had as a pet? I do this partly because I want to hear their voices; by encouraging participation from the start, my students are more likely to feel comfortable contributing to our discussions. I also ask these questions because I want to show them that their perspectives matter, not only to me, but also to the world outside of the classroom. This, I believe, is the most important aspect of teaching students to write. By inquiring into how our experiences shape our perspectives, we might learn how to articulate those perspectives into insightful creative work.
I also take care to promote an inclusive classroom environment by ethically engaging vocabularies and discourses that respect my students’ identities, as well as the complexity of their personal and cultural experiences. I’ve foregrounded my pedagogy on how to get my students to consider perspectives that differ from their own.
For that reason, I think about diversity in my courses as soon as I begin writing the syllabus. I am most interested in texts which invite difficult discussions pertaining to race, gender, and class, because, from my own experience, this is my best opportunity to expand my own point of view and invite my students to see the world through a more generous lens. When I teach a creative writing workshop, for instance, I tend to choose stories by authors from various cultural and racial backgrounds, such as Edwidge Danticat, Rattawut Lapcharoensap or Danielle Evans.
After considering diversity in viewpoint, my curriculum emphasizes two major aspects of writing that I welcome into my own practice: language and form. The first thing that sets writers apart from others is their fascination with language. I read poetry out loud to my students and have them listen to broadcasts of authors reading their writing; I also encourage my students to read their writing to each other. In each class, I invite my students to engage in exercises that emphasize rhythm and image, and emphasizing that in order to be a writer, one must not only have knowledge of their subject matter, but also knowledge of how to convey that subject matter in a way that catches and sustains the reader’s attention.
I incorporate the second aspect, form, by showing my students how to read like a writer. Our reading assignments help us to recognize a variety of forms and techniques that we can incorporate into our work. The ability to recognize and incorporate another writer’s form and technical tricks is not something most of my students bring with them on the first day of class. I teach them to read this way, passing on this knowledge through discussion and reflective writing assignments. In the personal narratives course I designed for students at Florida State, for instance, I assigned an “Imitation Essay,” which allowed them to demonstrate how their reading practice reinforced their writing practice.
My experience has taught me that oftentimes, a student’s performance hinges on the amount of confidence they have in their own writing and their ability to do well in the course. I also understand that much of this depends on whether they sense that I have confidence, as an instructor, in their ability to succeed. For this reason, I make sure to announce on the first day of class and before each major assignment is due, that I am looking forward to reading their work, and that I want to see every student do well with their writing.
With the same spirit in mind, I design creative writing workshops to promote community instead of competition, encouraging students to view their exchange of creative work as a way to connect not just to readers, but to other writers. They learn to view the exchange of stories and creative essays as an opportunity to improve their writing and help others to do the same, looking for points of encouragement, for how to improve the writer’s vision evident in the text instead of emphasizing how to tear the writing apart. In the end, I view the workshop as a student’s first step into entering a literary community.
In this way, we might see writing itself as a community practice. It encourages us to be present, observant, and interpretive, making use of all details, pleasant or unpleasant, from all aspects of our lives and framing them in language that helps us to connect to one another. Put another way: writing allows us to view our lives through a more compassionate lens. Ultimately, I emphasize that writing, in all forms, serves as a contribution to a larger narrative that we are in the process of telling about ourselves and about our world. In the meantime, I encourage my students to adopt an attitude of enthusiastic inquiry about their experiences. This is ultimately what keeps me writing: the chance to approach others with a joyful curiosity. I encourage my students to do the same.
