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 possibilities for how to change the world and hope for a better tomorrow. In many respects, I seek to develop this same principle of transformation with my students in the composition classroom. While it may be ambitious to think of First-Year Writing as utopian, I have found students very responsive in constructing a space where they can develop a sense of agency and utilize composition as an act of utopian transformation. By emphasizing composition as a utopic site through practices like self-reflection, 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, their communities, and the world.

          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. I seek to facilitate this process 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, rather than positioning myself as the all-knowing teacher and students as mere receptacles of my teaching with impaired agency, I instead present myself and the classroom as constructed practices while giving students the freedom to deconstruct, critique, and re-imagine those same practices. This empowerment of student agency, I have found, makes them far more willing to share and reflect on their own rhetorical choices in their everyday lives, growing to see these choices as valuable sites of critical inquiry. In doing so, 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). Additionally, I reinforce this practice through assignments like a literacy narrative that emphasize how students can reflect on and value their own practices of literacy. My utopian pedagogy therefore places the students as the primary authors, and their experiences as the primary texts, of the classroom while deconstructing my own practices of teaching in ways that allow the students to re-imagine their lives and the classroom experience on their terms.

          As I argue in my scholarship, utopia is not a static, perfect place but site a constant transformation through imagining what the self and the world are and what they could be. Within the classroom, I reflect this principle through emphasizing to students that self-reflection and composition are never finished practices.  In doing so, I draw on Donald Murray’s centering 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. To reinforce this concept, the final major assignment in my English 101 class asks students to remediate a previous assignment from a standard academic essay into a new genre or medium of their choosing. In doing so, students are invited to see their own writing not as static and flat, but embodying a plurality of meanings and able to be transformed in a multitude of ways. By recognizing this, students can begin to think of their own lives and the world around them as equally transformable. Hence, utopian pedagogy means inviting students to see themselves and their writing as always dynamic just as the world itself is.

           Indeed, I center these connections by making sure students have the opportunity to apply classroom concepts towards changing the world, not simply through teaching transferable skills but in asking them to use those skills for transformation. Part of this comes from empowering students to use mediums and genres that go beyond the academic essay, wherein students cultivate a more expansive rhetorical repertoire for use both in 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 project, I offer students the chance to utilize this multimodal approach through developing their own public awareness campaigns, wherein they apply previously learned skills in rhetorical persuasion to issues they care about like pollution or the death penalty via genres ranging from letters to 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.

          Hence, my teaching philosophy of utopian pedagogy works to actively make students question themselves, the classroom context, and to both realize and apply their own power to change the world.

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