A Philosophy of Teaching

From a young age, I’ve been insatiably curious about the learning process. I wanted to know, how does learning evolve over time and from person to person? What impact does technology have on our learning? And why do some learning communities thrive while others wither or die out?

Becoming an educator provided an avenue for exploring these questions in depth, but also opened new pathways of inquiry. One such pathway lead me to reflect on my work with students from marginalized communities. Being a mixed-race woman raised on the wrong side of the proverbial tracks, it’s an audience and an identity that hits close to home. While my mother was fervent about education, it was not something my father valued. He was always looking for the next short-term hustle that would get us through the next month, sometimes even the next week. I could see this same kind of mentality at work in these students. Like my father, they approached their education as a short-term hustle, not an opportunity to develop or expand their skill sets.

And so a new series of inquiry began, largely influenced by Hélène Cixous's essay “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Now I want to know, how can I inspire disenfranchised students to put themselves into their education? What teaching methods can I adopt that embrace curiosity, encourage autonomy, and promote self-efficacy? And why have students become so apathetic to their own learning?

Curiosity

Ignorance is often seen as a weakness when it should be regarded as an opportunity for learning and inquiry. In fact, it is these knowledge gaps that ignite our curiosity. As we mature, this curiosity transforms from simple exploration into a higher intellectual impulse toward more advanced scientific and philosophical knowledge. This intellectual impulse triggers an intrinsic motivation that allows deep learning to happen with ease. I want to reawaken this natural curiosity often lost in marginalized students.   

When students approach learning with curiosity and creativity, they are more likely to succeed in the classroom. One way to inspire this type of curiosity in the classroom is by including course design that is novel, complex, and comprehensible. In my courses, I use elements and activities that students haven’t encountered before or approach familiar activities from an alternative perspective, and then calibrate the complexity of these experiences so they are neither too hard nor too easy to understand. Employing this approach allows me to help students generate their own connections and deeper meanings to the exercises presented in class while reconciling the disassociation between coursework and the real-life application.

In my first-year writing course, I use monstrosity as the framework for students’ exploration into the course materials. The inherent ambiguity of the monstrous prompts open-mindedness, productive questioning, careful scrutiny, and flexible research. Students are encouraged to bring this open-mindedness and flexibility to the thinking and writing they do during the course. In addition, the novelty of the subject matter challenges students to explore uncharted intellectual vistas and develop a deeper understanding of the rhetorical choices we consciously and subconsciously make everyday.

Autonomy

In a system where students are assigned identities based on standardizations, curiosity leads to a questioning of the status quo and breeds dissent. It is this same curiosity that compels students to seek their autonomy and show their identities are different from and more complex than the identities ascribed to them by an educational system that values the predictability of compliance over the chaos of curiosity.

As students fight to maintain their individuality within a homogenized educational structure, educators must combat the resulting academic apathy or, worse, outright disruption. We do this not by inflicting more classroom edicts, but by engaging our students’ underlives in a constructive way that supports learning and promotes autonomy. First, educators must see their students as individuals and embrace the knowledge that they bring from their previous experiences. Second, educators need to meet students in the digital spaces they frequently inhabit. To this end, I welcome disruptive technology in the classroom because it provides an opportunity for students to think critically about the technologies they use on a daily basis while providing a platform for individualization.

In my first year writing course, I was fortunate enough to find a text that had been produced in a variety of mediums—a print book, a web comic, and a video. Students are allowed to choose which medium they want to engage with as part of an in-class activity. Following the reading or viewing of the text, we discuss how the medium changed the way they reacted to the text and its message. Similarly, I often encourage students to find alternative texts for in-class and online discussion and post their findings to the course’s social media accounts. These stimulating classroom activities nurture my students’ psychological need for autonomy and validation while motivating them to take the initiative with their own learning.

Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy enables a person to rely on their existing skills and knowledge to be successful and achieve their goals. Unfortunately, students from marginalized communities often have low perceptions of their efficacy and, as a result, are more susceptible to procrastination, learning disengagement, and academic despondency.

But disenfranchised students are not alone in experiencing low efficacy. Research has shown that repeated failures often result in decreased feelings of self-efficacy. When students learn to see failure as a reflection of their ability and self-worth, they approach new challenges with a sense of fear instead of as opportunities for exploration and experimentation they can use beyond the classroom. My students are not only taught to expect failure, but to embrace it as an avenue for expanded learning.

In my composition courses, I support mastery-based over performance-based goals and motivate students to actively participate in their learning by applying game mechanics and principles to the course structure and materials. By gamifying traditional course activities, I can spark my students’ curiosity and foster their autonomy while improving their self-efficacy. In my first-year writing courses, I regularly employ game elements like experience points that provide real-time feedback and progress tracking, achievement badges with metrics that promote learning over solely earning a grade, time sensitive Easter egg challenges that reward students for exploring optional course materials, level progressions that unlock new content as previous content is mastered, scaffolded modules of increasing complexity that guide students through the material, and a safe space for failure where students have multiple chances to achieve success. The aim is for students to have fun as they develop research and writing skills necessary to succeed in college and in the workplace.