Making Connections to a Teaching Philosophy

I keep coming back to Perl’s idea of how editing “breaks down the rhythms generated by thinking and writing.” This leads me to think about my future ESL adult learners—people with fully developed brains, unique ideas, and universal emotional and intellectual needs to express themselves. I think of their attempts to edit themselves as they use English and how this impacts the rhythms of their thinking and writing. This, in turn, brings to mind Brodkey’s article on breaking down class and gender barriers, which can be extended to race and language barriers and other barriers. And there’s the example of Shen, who has been able to cross language barriers, but whose Chinese rhetorical rhythms will mostly remain unknown to us, his Western readers.

All of these ideas bring me around to my own teaching philosophy: Is my teaching for the purpose of helping my students fit in and succeed? Is my purpose for teaching to help my students develop their own voices? Is it to help achieve/promote/idealize a common standard of communication? Or am I teaching to meet professional teaching standards or standardized learning outcomes? I don’t yet know.