Graduation this time around is significant for several reasons. As I finish up my Master's degree, I am also finishing up my first year of teaching college composition. It has been a special kind of year, with a lot of sleepless nights and seemingly endless papers to grade. I've had the opportunity to learn a lot of things, both as a student and as an educator.
Since I'm approaching such a major milestone in my life, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the teaching philosophy I wrote a year ago. It has been interesting for me to see how it has changed and how it has stayed the same; I've been able to reflect on it to see what possibilities I can continue to carry over into any future classrooms that I might have.
Kristi Dao's Teaching Philosophy (April 2024)
After teaching for a year, it has been reinforced that community-based learning is a core pedagogical approach in my teaching philosophy. Like Fred Rogers, I strive to be an educator who wants to be a better neighbor in my community. This means that I encourage student agency and collaboration in the classroom and beyond it. In my classroom, students are frequently encouraged to imagine ambitious futures for themselves and seek out rich learning opportunities in and out of the classroom, which I strive to do through a combination of disability studies, feminist pedagogy, student-centered learning, and multimodality.
Jay Dolmage has a beautiful metaphor for communication about how you cannot communicate in isolation. That is why I believe in student-centered learning and collaboration. A unique practice I have in my classroom is that I take the time to negotiate rubrics in my classroom when it comes to major assignments. In the process of collaborating on the development of rubrics, students can develop an understanding of assignment expectations and discover and utilize their voice. By asking students to engage in the writing and creation process, and to articulate their development and needs as writers, they establish shared responsibility for course content and seek to make connections between what is learned in the classroom and the world outside of it. I hope that engagement in my classroom then translates into their lives beyond education as critical consumers and communicators who interact with texts and media in the world in a global, local, and digital context.
A conversation with Andrea Lunsford made me realize that I want to establish an inclusive, accessible classroom that supports student learning. I value challenging students to explore new subject matter and test their abilities as communicators and collaborators. Feminist pedagogy is also how I handle student conflict in the classroom. One of my aims as a teacher is to listen to students, value their experiences, linguistic diversity, cultural backgrounds and differences, and center collaboration and conversation as avenues for learning and making meaning. The same way that Lunsford would be asked a question, and then answer, “I think this about that, but what do you think?” is how I want to approach learning within my classroom. I do not want to give them all the answers; I want to speculate with them to create a shared sense of knowledge based on their experiences and what they know. These conversations showcase pedagogical values of critical thinking, curiosity, rhetorical awareness, research, and metacognition.
My goal is to provide space for students to engage with different literacies and to foster student agency and collaboration. I emphasize developing multimodal skills because I believe that it aligns with composition goals such as writing processes and adaption, multiple literacies and goal setting, variation across contexts, decision-making and production, and writing and power. Students will have opportunities to make meaning through different rhetorical situations, modalities, and composing practices to build rhetorical awareness of texts and technologies. I am especially excited to engage with my students in a way that will get them to take risks and apply these critical thinking skills beyond the classroom. I encourage students to develop an ePortfolio that showcases and synthesizes the skillsets they have developed so that they can highlight the ways that they are prepared to enter the job market. I aim to communicate to students that the skills they learn in my composition class are applicable and transferable far beyond the four walls of my classroom and our campus.
Through this combination of multimodality, disability studies, feminist pedagogy, and student-centered learning, I know that I will be able to adequately support my students in the classroom and learn from them so that we can mutually grow and better our communities.
It's a lot to say that I am about to accomplish the one thing that I have always wanted, but I'm so excited to see what's waiting for me around the corner.
What did post-grad life look like for you? Are you interested in hearing what happens for me next? Is there an aspect of teaching that you would like for me to talk about here on the blog? I would love to hear about it in the comments below!