Statement of Teaching Philosophy

I took my first teaching job in 1991, one year after graduating from college. The private high school sat in a nondescript one-story office building on the outskirts of Orlando and serviced students who had ‘fallen through the cracks’ of the public school system. These students had failed out, dropped out, skipped out, and been kicked out. Others simply hadn’t fit in, or their parents had lost faith in public schooling. An English major without a single education course, I had worked in my college’s writing center as peer writing consultant, so I understood that each student arrives with different needs and potentials. I hoped for the results found in a Welcome Back, Kotter episode, but suspected my classroom might more resemble a Floridian Lord of the Flies. On those days when the bell rang and class went off without a hitch, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Armed with outdated and battered anthologies, a sense of humor, and an open mind, I engaged my classes. The students—the good, the bad, the intolerant, and those with sloth-like work habits—frustrated me and pushed me intellectually. Their questions, their resistance, and their flat-out distrust of power opened up the world for me. What I learned from my students complemented and contradicted my formal education in contortions that left me seeing the world as wonderfully complex and dynamic.

Since then, I have taught English at a technical college, another alternative high school, a community creative writing workshop, and, for the last five years, a research-one university. I’ve taught classes where minorities were the majority, where every single student was older than I was, and where a seventeen-year-old sat next to a seventy-five-year old. With these ranges of student populations, I could not be the same teacher in each and every class. I learned to constantly rethink my approaches and my attitudes toward teaching, and I have become a teacher who is more responsive, responsible, and compassionate.

In an essay entitled “On Writing,” Raymond Carver says, “There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won’t be a story.” Carver is addressing the nature of fiction, but he could be characterizing writing and literature classrooms. My aim is for my classes to exist as intellectual and physical places where something happens. This something is change; it’s seeing the world in a new way. For this to happen the classroom must be dynamic and challenging, and though it may sound like a dirty word, a classroom should, like a story, entertain. With literature, we stretch our imagination and intellect to explore people, places, and problems. Good classrooms and the best stories challenge our thinking rather than secure our judgments or make us feel inadequate.

In beginning fiction classes, many students feel intimidated by the very act of writing and this thing called literature. They have assumptions of what writer means, but if they’re in a writing class they are writers, sharing and engaging—conversing—with other writers. In advanced classes, I encourage writers to see themselves as sitting with the great novelists that E. M. Forster describes, “all writing their novels simultaneously.” In course evaluations, I hear many comments like this one from a beginning fiction-writing student: “I had no idea what to expect, but this became my favorite class at UNL. I felt challenged, encouraged and respected in this class.” Although I want students to be comfortable, I don’t encourage quick or easy thinking. My goal is to offer friction that will challenge their assumptions about society, self, and writing. I encourage them to see their own work not in terms of limits (as in “do it this way”) but in terms of possibility. I offer suggestions, but the writing belongs to the writer.

Workshops should offer writers ways to see the tensions in their work. Writers must constantly see their work with fresh eyes. To this end, I assign writing sequences that offer a new way into a draft, pushing the writers to experiment with elements of craft (e.g., genre, point of view, voice, etc.). I don’t want the assumptions and limitations of an earlier draft to weigh down the forward momentum of their imagination so that they simply change a line here or there. In one evaluation, a student said, “I learned a lot about the craft of writing, how stories are constructed; —also, I learned about revision—appreciating what’s present in a piece and being willing to eliminate.” In class, we discuss the construction of published work and student writing; we search for what makes a particular story work and why another piece leaves us unaffected. As a writer, I share my personal experiences and discuss tips and tales that I’ve gleaned from other writers.

Recognizing that writing does not occur in a vacuum, I teach in an interdisciplinary style, using a variety of source material, including stories, essays, films, and visual art. When students engage with multiple genres and media, they develop stronger critical reading skills and see narratives everywhere. We venture beyond the classroom, finding inspiration and research materials in art museums, the natural world, city streets, and in library stacks. We seek out the tensions in our readings and observations, exploring how they work when transposed on our own worldview. We share our discoveries and find that as astute readers we have something at stake in all of this, that we are readers in “relentless motion.”

That’s it, really: relentless motion. The student is like the classroom, like the story, like the world. We move forward, responding to a multitude of forces, and thereby change and respond once again in this never-ending narrative that we share through imagination and intellect. There is an African proverb that says, “all stories are true,” and I challenge my students with this concept. As they engage narrative, they shatter the barrier between story and self. In this way, they see the world anew. As a teacher, I aim to make sense of a world in relentless motion, and this, too, is my aim for my students.