TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

My teaching philosophy boils down to this: I try to develop students’ technical skills: their ability to write, read, and think.  Simultaneously, I try to encourage sensitivity, respect, and reverence for the lives they will encounter, work for, influence, and impact with their art and design.  Simply put and in the most extreme case, I try to make it impossible for future Leni Riefenstahls to work for the likes of Hitlers when they film, animate, advertise, sculpt, paint, draw, and design. 

    I try to develop the gamut of these skills by assigning literary texts and films whose esthetic content and craftsmanship hold up under close scrutiny, and texts and films that develop cultural scaffolding so students grow savvy about the artistic traditions they are joining, thus giving them much to engage with when they speak and write.  I try to assign works that ignite the flame to begin an education that will burn for a lifetime and will inspire students with their humanity, developing  joie de vivre while encouraging sensitivity to others and strengthening the capacity for compassion and courage so they will be able, when necessary, to speak truth to power.

     I believe it is important for students to know that they are art- makers too when they write, that in English classes they are making pieces of literary art called essays and poems and stories.  They need to develop a vocabulary so they can manipulate the resources of this sister art more consciously in order to say what they need to say memorably and well.  In addition, students need to write and revise a lot to get good at it.  And they need to sit down one-on-one with serious practitioners of the craft--poets and writers--from time to time to get feedback on their writing.  They also need to learn to sift peer critiques of their work and to articulate critiques of their peers’ work in order to develop as editors who are ultimately capable of critiquing their own writing.  Finally, I hope to help students discover and exploit the synergy between writing and art-making and designing.

     I try to create a classroom atmosphere that feels safe, wherein students feel respected and free to express themselves and respond to one another.  This does not mean that their assumptions and complacencies won’t be challenged, nor that the work will be easy, nor that I will patronize them with unearned inflated grades.   My classes tend to raise the bar.  They consist mostly of lecture/ discussions and close reading of multiple texts and films, with some drafting, exercises, group work, and student presentations.  During lecture/discussions, I can share scholarly information, and students can help us all learn with their own knowledge, insights, and questions. 

    I love low-tech chalkboards and use them often; I find our high tech classrooms handy for showing images and films, as do students for giving presentations.  And I try to monitor students’ stress, with comic relief in lectures or assignments when the doctor orders.

      CCAD, without a doubt, offers students exceptional opportunities to develop and refine art- and design-making skills.  The Liberal Arts help shape and temper the human beings applying those skills, and English courses are a big part of that effort.   Without attention to minds and hearts, education may mean little, or worse.