Courses & Teaching Philosophy

The classroom is a community space, and as such, it should be a space where students bring their questions and come up with responses and solutions together. In my writing instruction, I recognize writing as a social process and place an emphasis on collaboration among students in order to center them in the classroom. As a teacher and moderator in the communal writing space, I approach classroom conversations with both my specific writing expertise and an open mind, conducting the symphony of ideas through careful listening, asking pertinent questions, and offering advice and guidance.  

 

Writing classrooms of the past have focused a final product as a means for defining student success; by contrast, engaging in a process of communal inquiry in the writing classroom not only aids in students’ integration into society through learning how to develop final written products, but also helps them learn how to participate in critically assessing social systems and arguing for change. As Felicia Rose Chavez says about the anti-racist workshop, “we need to reorient from centering ourselves as authority and centering whiteness as neutral, objective, and universal... reorienting from speaking to listening to our students, from product – what they create – to a process – how they create” (“Product”). In order to focus on process over product, I center students and their work during our class time in several key ways: exploring student’s lines of inquiry as Paulo Friere discusses in his problem-posing teaching method, encouraging peer discussion and review of work, and providing a validating writing environment. 

 

Students come into the writing classroom with an established capacity to make meaning of the world; my role as teacher is to guide them depending on the areas of “meaning-making” they need to develop further (Berthoff 648). In my class structure, writing projects start within the areas of “meaning-making” in which students have a vested interest. For example, one of the projects in my Writing & Rhetoric I class involves the students selecting an aspect of their identity to explore. From there, students identify sources that can enhance their understanding of their identity such as family members, community members, or historical records. In order to focus on the process of composition over the final product, I dedicate class time to actively practicing critical thinking and writing skills through discussions and writing exercises.  

 

In order to create a community-based writing classroom, feedback doesn’t just come from me, but from each of the students on one another's work. We discuss each student’s work with several goals in mind: addressing style in ways that support the student’s right to their own language; addressing the diverse, flexible ways of constructing a composition and how the construction supports the content; and addressing the core argument and its support (Committee). We approach these goals from a place of inquiry where the students seek clarity for one student’s piece as a collective, helping not only that student improve their skills, but all of those who are inquiring as well. I frequently use Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process to guide the feedback process, which facilitates a dialogue between students while I moderate the discussion. 

 

In order to create a classroom environment where students feel safe to provide critique and support for one another, I provide both consistent validation and careful consideration of topics the students bring into discussion. Providing validation as an instructor includes demonstrating concern, being personable and approachable, treating students with respect, and providing scaffolded learning experiences and one-on-one support. Validation, as theorized and studied by Laura I. Rendón Linares, helps students “believe in their inherent capacity to learn, become excited about learning, feel a part of the learning community, and feel cared about as a person, not just a student” (15). It also plays a key part in liberating students by affirming their own identities and ways of knowing, which in turn helps them feel capable of tackling difficult material and challenging ideas in class. To provide a safe, validating space, I ask the students to share with one another their previous writing experiences regarding drafting and revising, affirming the variety of approaches that arise as options for each of them to try out in their own processes. 

 

While I hope my writing classroom can function as a community of its own, I recognize that it is a simulated version of the real communities in which my students are living and writing. My hope as an instructor is to provide a place where students feel safe to pursue their questions and develop their writing for that real world through guided opportunities to practice writing and a model audience to read their work. Out of this affirming, process-oriented space, students can develop skills to create meaningful, polished final products to share with the world. 

 

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Sources 

 

Berthoff, Ann E. “Learning the Uses of Chaos.” The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models and Maxims. Heinemann, 1981. 

 

Committee on CCCC Language Statement. “Students' Right to Their Own Language.” College English, Vol. 36, No. 6, (Feb., 1975), pp. 709-726. National Council of Teachers of English. 

 

"Product to Process: The Anti-Racist Workshop.” Nothing Never Happens, March 29, 2021, Lucia Hulsether and Tina Pippin with Felicia Rose Chavez.  

https://nothingneverhappens.org/uncategorized/product-to-process-the-anti-racist-writing-workshop/  

 

Lerman, Liz. “Critical Response Process.” https://lizlerman.com/critical-response-process/  

 

Rendón Linares, Laura I., and Susana M. Muñoz. “Revisiting Validation Theory: Theoretical Foundations, Applications, and Extensions.” Enrollment Management Journal, Vol. 5, Issue 2, Summer 2011, pp. 12-33.