As a teacher, I believe that learning is a collaborative and recursive process. While some might be able to sit in a garret alone and pull knowledge from the aether without instruction or practice, most, I think, cannot. I certainly can’t. Learning comes through “conversation”—with peers, with teachers, with texts, with each other, with students. Learning is a process, not a destination. I teach, and enjoy teaching, because I like to learn and I learn more—about the material, my students, and myself—through teaching.

 

Thinking of myself as a learner, as well as a teacher, helps me focus on my students’ learning. As a teacher, I am less concerned with their grades as I am with their learning. Students cheat or plagiarize when all that matters is the grade. They care about grades because our culture and institutions often (in effect, at least, if not in practice) conflate grades with merit and knowledge acquisition. More often than not, however, this rewards those who started with more knowledge or experience and doesn’t usually reflect personal progress, growth, or learning.

 

I, therefore, am committed to what I might call “person-first teaching.” This philosophy is built on a commitment to diversity, equity, and accessibility. Or perhaps more concretely stated, it is built on a foundation of anti-racist, anti-inequity, and anti-ableist pedagogy. This approach to pedagogy begins with acknowledging my own biases and privilege—and the biases and privilege of the culture and academy that I occupy. Such a pedagogical approach is a continuous process of learning and improving—making conscious choices and taking deliberate actions. I strive to reflect this person-first pedagogy in how I treat all students, my approach to instruction, and my philosophies on grading and feedback.

 

At the core of this pedagogy is a respect for students. This philosophy takes different forms. The first is in how I talk to and about my students. I never speak to or of my students as if they are children. When instructors talk about their students as “kids,” they inevitably think about them as less-than in other ways. I’m not sure people realize they are revealing more about themselves as teachers than their students when they say things like, “These kids don’t know how to write!” of students in their own writing course. Inevitably, such exclamations are also coded (if unintentional) racism, evaluating writing by white academic standards. Thinking and treating students as people, caring about them as whole people with lives and struggles outside of my class, is important to me. I strive to be open and respectful with my students and ask that they be the same with me.

 

This also means that I try never to underestimate students. I believe in challenging my students and pushing them outside their comfort zones. In literature classes, for example, I have them read and engage with literary theory, even in core-level classes. In composition classes, I try to give them readings and assignments that encourage them to interrogate their own preconceptions and biases to help them become better researchers. This self-interrogation is also part of my anti-racist pedagogy. If my goal is to teach them to read, write, and think critically, I must offer them real opportunities to learn, confront, and practice those skills in real material ways, not just in the abstract. While students might find such work difficult, I find that they are more engaged with the course material and feel like they are getting more from the course—as students and as people.

 

“Person-first teaching” also means that I try to focus on each student’s individual progress. I value substantive formative feedback over quantitive evaluation, and reflective self-assessment of learning over “objective” grading. I also strive to give more face-to-face feedback (or virtual feedback—through screencasting/voice recording) rather than just relying on written feedback that students may or may not read. In my experience, I see greater improvement in class from those who speak with me regularly out of class because they have more feedback and more opportunities to learn and practice what they learn.

 

Practice is an important part of the learning process for me. While I know some students will grasp a technique or a concept from a lesson or a reading, many will need to interact with the course materials repeatedly and in different ways. Learning is recursive. Just as Dwayne Johnson did not walk into a gym one day and come out a few hours later as The Rock, I don’t expect my students to be experts in writing or literature after one class session—or even an entire semester.

 

I strive, therefore, to incorporate several opportunities for students to practice skills and techniques inside and outside of class as well as reflect on their progress/learning through metacognitive exercises. This practice may take the form of larger writing assignments and full-class discussions, but also smaller assignments and discussion. For example, I like to start class sessions with low-stakes freewriting or an electronic poll (using menti.com, for example) to get them thinking individually about a reading or the day’s topic. I will then often have them work in smaller groups to discuss what they wrote or how they responded before moving to a larger class discussion or more individual writing/revision.

 

I also like to dedicate class time to the work of the course (writing, close reading, analysis, etc.)—providing time to practice and employ the concepts we are learning. This practice often involves both individual work and collaborative work. For example, I may have them draft a research question (composition) or answer a question about the theory (literature) then share it with a peer, discuss it and get feedback/collaborate (and providing feedback to their peer), and then revise it. I find this helps students understand writing/reading/learning as a recursive process and gives them more time to work through that process.

 

My emphasis on practice, feedback, and self-reflection applies to me as a teacher as well. Just as I strive to provide constructive and productive feedback to students, I invite them to do the same for me. In addition to the formal end-of-semester student evaluations, I frequently have an informal evaluation around midterm that asks roughly the same questions. I find these mid-point evaluations give me a sense of how a course is going and gives me the chance to make adjustments or clarify things. I also often ask students to do some reflective writing to assess what they got out of the course, what worked for them, what didn’t, and explain/reflect on why.

 

Although I have received my fair share of student evaluations with comments complaining about the comfort of the classroom seating, I value student feedback as a mechanism for self-reflection. I have a tendency—as I think many do—to only “see” any remotely negative comment, so I make a great effort to weigh such feedback with the positive majority and reflect on why I received either. I try to understand the positions of the students who gave me the feedback and why they might have responded in certain ways. I take this feedback, combined with my own assessment of how the course went, and make changes accordingly. One of the things I love about teaching at the college level is that every semester can be an experiment, a chance to try new things and refine old things.

 

Teaching is central to my work as an academic. My scholarship helps me as a teacher because it helps me remain a learner and offers new ideas and texts to explore and implement. Teaching helps me to become a better scholar and researcher because it gives me a reason to discover new ideas as well as a place to test out and explore those ideas. It has also improved my research and

writing, as I think about my research not only as a scholar but as a teacher, considering broader perspectives and different audiences.