A Digital Education Portfolio
Pedagogical Concerns & Perspective
I have come to consider teaching—whether composition, creative writing, or literature—not as an act of power, but an act of devotion to persons and ideas, and the congruence these can share. This belief informs and reforms my pedagogy as my interaction with course materials and students continually encourages reflection on what—in the current historic-political moment—is in need of conversation. Because I value a pedagogy of love, I craft my discussions, workshops, and assignments to be malleable to a student’s own interdisciplinary interests to stoke in students the critical thinking skills necessary to understand themselves and their world.
PEDAGOGY of LOVE
As an instructor I value collaborative alongside individual production and discussion above lecture. My task as teacher is to participate and not simply facilitate the discussion to demonstrate the life-long nature of learning and the necessity of continuing dialogue among ideas. Answers should always produce more questions, and I am far more concerned with students’ ability to ask and entertain questions than find or produce answers.
COLLABORATION
The task of preparing and forming our students for participatory democracy is impossible without guiding those students toward something to love. Reformed from Charles Taylor's and James K. A. Smith’s works, this pedagogy of love is my guiding classroom ideal, fashioning my classroom to practice regenerative discourse.
DISCOURSE
While I do not always practice a democratic-based reading selection in all my courses, in “Composition I” a student-selected course anthology centers our dialogue; this highlights the conversational nature of learning and develops a range of composition skills. In this process, students contribute and excerpt articles, comics and graphic novels, music videos and other media to create a classroom anthology of texts with which we work for the semester.
MULTIMODALITY
I approach my courses with an interdisciplinary perspective, emphasizing that the production and advancement of art and knowledge is an act of love. With Willa Cather's My Antonia, we might evaluate Emmylou Harris's song of the same name, investigating how it interprets the novel and uses and adapts its themes. With excerpts of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Maan, we might analyze Jeff Wall's photography, to practice the art of seeing and visual perspectives.
HUMANITIES
As a teacher, I want my students to know I am a learner alongside them. The dynamism, the livingness of learning, continually broadens the scope and possibilities of my classroom. To the student then holding, maybe for the first time, the coals of revelation, acts of learning become acts of love broadening their language and their community.
REVISION