Blog #9- The "How To-" and Working it Out

I’ve been thinking about my teaching philosophy and what I want my future (and current) students to come away with when they leave my class. The “How-to teaching philosophy” points out a few questions that I have been asking myself, and I think I want my students to be think critically about the stuff that they commit to paper. My interest in social justice issues  stems from this in that I want my students to be thinking individuals. I don’t care what they believe as long as they think about their choices and become functioning thinking adults. Critical thinking skills have been a major concern of mine while leading workshops. I worked with an instructor who once said that his students couldn’t think critically about the material, but I remember that comment bothered me. I thought it’s not that they can’t think, it’s that they have been so discouraged by writing teachers making general assumptions about them that they have given up. I really don’t want to be that instructor. I want to be a version of Mike Rose I guess, but you know, me. I want to engage my students in subjects that have an immediate impact on them and lead them to critical reasoning. I guess I stick to social justice issues because it’s what I know? But really any type of reading, yeah that too. I want my students to read more. 

Okay so I’m still working through it.  Anyway, in the Berlin reading he explains that expressionists believe that any good piece of writing is a personal. Speaking as someone who has written a quite a few formal papers that require distance (not that I’m arguing those papers were any good), I think it’s possible for students to produce pieces of writing that are largely detached from the person that they are. To explain, every essay that a student turns in is an effort to complete the course requirements. They can think through their argument, but in no way would I mean to suggest that the piece of writing is a piece of who they are. It’s a product that they are producing, perhaps the expressionist view hopes that students will put more of an effort into their work if they believe that the piece of writing is a piece of them…but then if they fail, isn’t that then a lot more discouraging? Maybe I’m overthinking this? Please correct me if I am.

-forgot to post this weeks ago, sorry!