My Teaching Philosophy:
A Utopian Approach to Pedagogy
As an academic, much of my work deals in literary utopias: visions of other worlds that have the power to estrange readers from their sense of ‘reality’ and allow them to see new possibilities for changing the world. Throughout my teaching in the composition classroom, I pursue this same principle of exploring new possibilities with my students by centering composition as an act of utopian transformation. Through teaching practices like self-reflection, research methodologies, process pedagogy, and multimodality, my goal as a teacher is to empower students by co-creating with them a space where they can imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.
Before thinking about how to change the world, utopian thinking requires first understanding the world and the self that occupies it. Hence, in teaching First-Year Writing, one of my goals is to work with my students to recognize the constant rhetorical choices they are making of which they may be unaware. Doing this recontextualizes their lives as ones of continuous rhetorical negotiation and, thus, of continuous opportunity for transformation. When teaching 101, I emphasize this sense of reflection through assignments like a literacy narrative where students consider their own practices of literacy as ways through which they navigate the world.
Similarly, the major assignments I teach in English 102 emphasize a variety of research methods and practices through which students can achieve a greater understanding the world around them. An Object Essay invites the students to explore popular sources around an item that has great personal meaning for them to consider its resonances in both their own lives and the lives of others. Additionally, an Autoethnography Essay asks students to research one of their communities and consider its goals and meanings for them and their fellow community members. Finally, a Researched Academic Argument Essay gives students the chance to analyze a topic from the perspective of their chosen disciplines, wherein they both research a topic of interest to them and consider the worldview of their chosen field of study. Through each of these assignments, the writing classroom becomes a place where students can evaluate their own positionality in the world and reflect on the objects, communities, and disciplines that animate their lives.
At the same time, as I argue in my scholarship, utopia is not a static, perfect place but a site of constant transformation through imagining what the self and the world are and what they could be. Within the classroom, I reflect this principle of transformation by emphasizing to students that self-reflection and composition are never finished practices. In doing so, I draw on Donald Murray’s articulation of process, wherein “It is the process of using language to learn about our world, to evaluate what we learn about our world, to communicate what we learn about our world” (Murray 4) where the real learning of the class takes place rather than in the completion of an assignment. One way I enact this concept of process is giving students the opportunity to revise all of their major assignments so that they can not only earn a higher grade but revisit, rethink, and rearticulate their thoughts.
Additionally, to reinforce this concept of writing as an endless process, the final major assignments in both English 101 and 102 invite students to transform their writing into a new form. In English 101, students remediate a previous assignment from a standard academic essay into a new genre or medium of their choosing. Similarly, the final assignment in English 102 asks students to synthesize their separate research projects into a larger group presentation of a digital poster that explores areas of overlap and difference between their disciplines, transforming their original essays by placing them conversation with those of their peers. In doing so, students are invited to see their own writing not as static and flat but as embodying a plurality of potential forms and meanings while also participating in the collective building of knowledge utopia demands.
Moreover, such activities also equip the students to use mediums and genres that go beyond the academic essay as students cultivate a more expansive rhetorical repertoire for use in both my class and beyond college. I here draw on Cynthia Selfe and Pamela Takayoshi with their argument that “In an increasingly technological world, students need to be experienced and skilled not only in reading (consuming) texts employing multiple modalities, but also in composing in multiple modalities” (Selfe and Takayoshi 3). Aside from the previously mentioned remediation and synthesis projects, I offer students the chance to utilize this multimodal approach through developing their own public awareness campaigns in English 101. In these campaigns, students apply previously learned skills of rhetorical persuasion to issues they care about like pollution or the death penalty via genres ranging from letters to U.S. Senators to Instagram posts. This assignment thus asks students to move beyond the classroom and instead see how their writing can change the world in an act of utopian transformation.
Finally, throughout these processes, I also seek to embody these concepts of reflection and transformation into the class itself by opening myself up to rhetorical analysis by my students. I frequently ask students what they think my rhetorical point is in various activities (such as my showing them pictures of wombats throughout the semester). In doing so, I present myself and the classroom as constructed practices while giving students the freedom to deconstruct, critique, and re-imagine those same practices. In this respect, my teaching philosophy mirrors bell hooks’s Engaged Pedagogy, wherein “When professors bring narratives of their experiences into classroom discussions it eliminates the possibility that we can function as all-knowing, silent interrogators” (hooks 21), which, I have found, has made students far more willing to share their own responses and ideas in class. Through this engaged pedagogy, I thereby aim to inspire students to re-imagine their lives and the classroom experience on their terms.
Hence, my teaching philosophy of utopian pedagogy works to actively make students question themselves, the classroom context, and the wider world with an aim towards both evaluating the world as is and then taking the next step in asking how it might be transformed.
Works Cited
hooks, bell. “Engaged Pedagogy.” Teaching to Transgress, Routledge, 2014, pp. 13-22
Murray, Donald M. "Teach Writing as a Process not Product.” Cross-Talk in Comp Theory:
A Reader, edited by Victor Villanueva Jr., National Council of Teachers of English,
1997, pp. 3-6.
Selfe, Cynthia, and Pamela Takayoshi. “Thinking about Multimodality.” Multimodal
Composition: Resources for Teachers, edited by Cynthia Selfe, Hampton Press, 2008,
pp. 1-12.
https://techstyle.lmc.gatech.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Takayoshi-Selfe.pdf