Erin Elizabeth Bell

STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

I have often heard that college instructors are “preparing students for the real world.” Early in my teaching career at Wayne State University, however, a highly respected colleague countered that claim and corrected it. “We are not preparing students for the real world. This is the real world,” she stated. This colleague was correct, and I have based many of my practices upon the idea that what happens in the classroom has real and lasting consequences-—not just in the future, but in the present.

 

As such, my aim is to immediately demonstrate how the course objectives in my literature or composition classes have significant connections to the students’ world, including their current classes and future professional endeavors. I use an inter- disciplinary classroom approach, so we come to understand how the work we perform coincides with students’ interests, life experiences, and professional goals and how the skills they gain are transferable to a variety of discourse and learning communities.

 

The fact is, the majority of the students in my courses (whether it is a literature or a composition course) are typically enrolled in the class to fulfill a general education credit, not based upon their own interests. Many students come to these classes with a self-professed aversion—if not downright hatred—of writing, so it becomes imperative to demonstrate the value of the course and to show that it can be a useful, interesting, and enjoyable experience if they focus their efforts upon subjects they are interested in. In order to do so, we discuss how their wide variety of interests, both scholarly and personal, can be further explored in an English class. I begin by telling students that every person in the class is an expert in at least one topic; that they know more about than anyone else in the class, whether it is organic chemistry or jazz music. I truly believe in this claim.

 

When students are able to research topics they are already interested in, it makes the process of scholarly research and writing interesting and engaging for them. Next, we talk about how our personal interests can be explored and expressed in the scholarly setting, and it certainly helps to show students how my own interests have been explored in scholarship. As evidenced on my curriculum vitae, my areas of interest are quite diverse. I encourage students to incorporate their own interests—whether personal or scholarly, whether fringe or mainstream—into our course projects. One example of this is demonstrated in the discourse community comics displayed in the appendix to this statement. My project asks students to describe their negotiation of a discourse community that they belong to, first in a traditional essay form, and secondly, in a comic or graphic representation.

 

By allowing students autonomy in their choice of subject matter for the project, they became engaged and simultaneously achieved several of the learning outcomes for the course. First, they became familiar with the concept of discourse community, and secondly, they mastered a new form of technology. Finally, by expressing their story in two different genres (essay and comic) they were able to conceptualize how the genre of a project can temper and change its reception by readers. Besides the discourse community assignment, I have gained student investment in the classroom in numerous other methods. I encourage students to pursue subjects that they have a vested interest in, so that an economics major discussed how poverty and class are explored in Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, or a student majoring in psychology wrote about “Post-traumatic stress disorder in the works of Toni Morrison,” and “Bipolar Disorder as portrayed in Nella Larsen’s novella Passing.”

 

Employing this inter-disciplinary approach not only leads to some extraordinary student work but also encourages students to think about how the courses in their major work with my courses and function together as a unit, not as two disparate arenas of thought. Ultimately, students begin to feel like a part of the academic community through the tasks we perform together. I encourage students to explore as many opportunities as available on campus and in its surrounding areas.

 

Instead of limiting our research to the classroom, I have led my students to many other learning communities in the Wayne State area; other real spaces which influence students’ ability to integrate a variety of primary sources in their work. Several of my students have submitted their final papers to local and national professional conferences, and we also visit a variety of scholarly locales as a class. In the past, I have arranged visits to The E. Azalia Hackley Collection of African Americans in the Performing Arts Special Collection at the Detroit Public Library. By granting students access to concrete examples of primary research including song lyrics, albums, manuscripts, and sheet music, (artifacts only available in Detroit, I might add) the task of performing research materialized as a very real process and out of the abstract.

 

I also wanted to demonstrate that students should take advantage of the very unique that Detroit itself can present as opportunities for research and scholarly exploration. After thumbing through the lyrics of a limited edition Motown record release, students realize that they can use a variety of materials for a primary source to research. Essentially, all the world is available for their scholarly interrogation, but Detroit itself is full of such opportunities. I ask students to begin envisioning themselves as part of the greater academic community through the work we perform inside our classroom. This can be quite liberating for some students who have not travelled beyond Detroit. As new members of the scholarly community, students are no longer tethered to our city or state, but are part of a community that transcends geographic location which signifies an intellectual exoneration for many students.

 

One of the most exciting examples of creating an academic community in my classroom is evidenced in classroom conferences I have planned and moderated. For the final project in English 2390, students were required to submit abstracts for approval before writing their research paper. This process allowed them to become more familiar with the genre of abstracts and also encouraged them to consolidate their thoughts into a cogent, cohesive paragraph. As “conference planner” and as course instructor, I compiled their projects into panels of similarly-themed presentations, and I created and printed the conference program which is include in the appendix to this statement. By presenting their work in front of an audience of their peers, students were able to demonstrate their command of the subject matter while simultaneously reviewing what they had learned over course.

 

Because the class conference was quite similar to what one would find in a professional setting, I served as moderator and students asked each other questions and offered critique and suggestions on their final projects. (This was helpful considering the final version of their paper would be submitted after this conference). The presentation and conference program were a method to legitimatize the activities and for the students to take ownership of their work. On a week to week basis, however, a good portion of class assignments put students at the center of the discourse community. Most class sessions contain some component of small group work in which I give students a close reading assignment to work through together. I have, for example, broken students up into groups and assigned each a topic to read for, such as symbolism, metaphor, and other literary devices. After discussing the assignment in the small group, students present their findings to the rest of the class. I also give at least one major assignment in which students are responsible for leading class discussions or presenting a Prezi or Powerpoint visual report to the class, such as the poetry reports included in the syllabus for English 2390. This gives students a chance to experience a leadership role and become “expert” for the session.

 

Beyond taking my students to the Detroit Public Library or our own Undergraduate Library for Research tutorials, I also encourage them to attend events on campus such as film screenings, department-sponsored talks and lectures, and many other events for extra credit opportunities that I call “co-curricular” activities. After attending such a lecture, students must connect the content of a lecture to class content and write a comparative essay. Technology is another term that is also coupled with the abstract “future,” yet as students move through their courses at Wayne State, and as some choose to apply for internships, graduate school, or places of employment, they must be familiar with technology now. As such, I typically rely upon technology in numerous ways in my classroom. This is manifested in the use of wikis and other electronic hubs for classroom support. Students can, and do, edit and add to these sources of information in journal entries, discussion board posts, and notes to their peers. Examples of past class wikis are included in the appendix of materials. I know many instructors profess a goal of life-long learning, and I count myself among this group.

 

To that end, I constantly strive to improve my own pedagogical practices. My area of study is literature, but as with many graduate teaching assistants, I am often called upon to teach composition, and in order to the teach it to the best of my abilities I have participated in numerous training sessions and committees. These experiences have proved invaluable to me and my students. Through my work with many of the senior composition lecturers, I have added to my cadre of tools and increased my knowledge of current composition practices. My CV mentions several of these trainings including my participation in a pilot program to re-design the English 1020 course (Introduction to College Writing) at Wayne State. In order to participate in the pilot program, the team accrued a large number of volunteer hours. We were required to read a wide variety of essays and books by Anne Beaufort, James Gee, John Swales, and other important composition theorists to prepare for curriculum development.

 

At the end of our pilot semester, our team also volunteered our time over several sessions to norm the results of our student work. I continue to develop and edit my syllabi from year to year based upon the expertise offered by my colleagues and instructors. I believe that as an instructor, I must constantly assess the methods, techniques and the subject matter I present to my students, and this is evidenced in my syllabi. I have continued to revise and tweak my syllabi for English 1020 and the other courses I teach based upon the pedagogical presentations I have participated in through our department. One might note that I have taught several “themed” English 1020 courses. (Past themes include technology, popular culture, and gender). This manner of organizing the course is the direct result of an idea presented at one of our graduate teaching assistant seminars. I also build assignment sequences and scaffold my writing assignments (as highlighted in several of my syllabi). This, too, was a practice I put into effect based upon a strategy outlined in a seminar for graduate teaching assistants. The point is that I do not view my pedagogical practices as stagnant, but rather as an organic set of processes and procedures that continue to develop over time and with training and feedback.

 

Over the past few years, I have found that my students not only accept the idea of an inter-disciplinary approach, but they invest in it, and excel in their work—not just in my class, but in their others as well. While it is great to receive positive feedback at the end of the semester regarding my dedication, my availability, or the fact that I introduced students to some of their new favorite authors—the true reward is watching my students grow as writers and as members of the scholarly community. One of the best aspects of teaching writing courses is that I can literally see the growth of a student’s skill set over the semester. Each year, I am surprised by the creativity and sophistication demonstrated in a number of final projects, and subsequently reminded of why the career path I have chosen is so important to my community.