STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY



STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY AND PRACTICE

Jeanne Costello

Recently, Yesenia, one of my TAP English 59 students stopped by my office to pick up my feedback on the outline for her first essay. I often require students to get their work from the envelope on my door so that they have to find my office. Once they’ve come, I can often convince them to hang out and talk for a few minutes about their essays or just life in general. So, when Yesenia arrived, I invited her in for a chat. I was concerned. Though she was taking 59 with me for the second time, Yesenia seemed stuck, not really learning from past mistakes. “What’s going on?” I asked. She started to respond, but then she burst into tears. It turns out that Yesenia isn’t getting a lot of parental support for being in college; because she isn’t exactly sure of what she wants to do with her future, her parents are pressuring her to get a job and stop “wasting her time at the j.c.” She and I talked about the difficulty of finding motivation to work hard at school under these circumstances. I told her she didn’t need to know what to do with her whole life; she just needed to focus on pursuing what she loved and derive motivation from that. I also reminded her that I was here to encourage her, that TAP was designed to provide her with the support she needed to reach her goals. She and I have been emailing regularly so she will stay connected and ask for help before she feels overwhelmed.

My experience with Yesenia demonstrates one thing I strongly believe about teaching: I serve my students best when I take a holistic approach. I need to understand the variety of factors that might prevent success—intensive work schedules, lack of family support, learning disabilities, unfamiliarity with the demands of college, etc.--and I need to address these directly, both in the classroom, by discussing time management techniques, for example, and in my personal conversations with them. Of course, my focus is helping them to build their reading and writing skills in my composition classes and their writing and literary analysis skills in my literature courses. I do this by giving them step-by-step strategies for whatever skills they’re developing in my class, whether it’s creating a thesis or analyzing a poem. However, it’s not always possible to focus on course content if there are other more powerful issues clouding their focus on school. So I do everything I can to get them into my office, and I ask them why they are having trouble completing an essay assignment or doing well on quizzes.

Sometimes, students just don’t understand the material, and the office visit offers the opportunity for me to customize instruction and address their questions directly. One semester, I spent an hour a week with Pamela who was confused and despaired of ever understanding early English poetry. I encouraged her to read the assignments aloud, line by line, asking her questions about the language until she was finally able to make sense of a Shakespearean sonnet or a John Donne love poem. One fall, I spent several office sessions guiding Arthur through his essays so he could discover when he tended to have comma splices then develop a strategy to find and fix these errors on his own. Other times, though, I discover students are working too much to spend adequate time on homework. In these cases, it’s more productive to brainstorm ways of making additional study time available than it is to further discuss thesis statements. I am teaching them to be better writers, yes, but I must also help them learn how to become effective college students.

I do this partly by fostering connection. From the simple way we arrange the desks in a circle to the collaborative activities I require, students learn early on the value of the working relationships they build with classmates and teachers. I also strive to challenge my students. Whatever the level, they have a demanding workload and tough grading standards, but I give them lots of feedback and opportunities for improvement. A book I read about the challenges community college students face, The College Fear Factor, argues that the most successful teachers have high expectations but provide support for students to achieve them. I always say that I push students hard in English 59 because I want them to reach English 100 ready and able to earn an “A,” not just squeak by with a “C.” I’ve had quite a few Literature students tell me that my class challenged them more than any other they had taken, and I am glad to hear it; I know that they’ll be confident in any English class at the university. I once got a message from Ladonna, a Liberal Arts major who had taken my literature survey. She was finally glad I had pushed her (she hadn’t initially been too thrilled about the difficulty of 211), for she was now thriving in her courses at Cal. State Fullerton.

Calls like that let me know that I make a difference for my own students. But to me, this is just the basics of what any teacher does: commit herself to her own students’ success. The other core belief that drives my practice is that a truly committed educator must care about more than just her own students; she must work to make the whole institution a place that fosters success for all students. Because I believe this, I see myself as an activist, someone striving to make Fullerton College the best possible place for all students to realize their dreams. If a student does well in my English 59, but later drops out because the college fails to meet her needs, then I feel a sense of failure. When I see that our student success rates continue to reflect an achievement gap for students of color, I am disappointed. As an activist, I will not only ask “why?” but also “what else can I do about it?” My own devotion in the classroom is not enough.

That is why I joined the Equity Committee and the Basic Skills Student Success Steering Committee, serving as the co-chair and Faculty Coordinator of Basic Skills Initiative (BSI) programs at Fullerton since 2009. In this role, I have overseen the development of multiple programs to help our basic skills students to be more successful. When I teach, I serve about two- hundred students a year. When I help to develop programs that support students across campus, I can serve potentially thousands more. In the face of newspaper articles that bemoan low completion rates at community colleges, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of the situation, to think “that’s just not my problem” and retreat to my own classroom believing I can only impact the students there. But students are not here for just one class with just one instructor. They come to get an education, the result of their entire experience at Fullerton College. If they are to reach their goals, their whole experience must be conducive to their success. And faculty must work together to make that happen.

Sometimes commitment to improving the institution in this way requires thinking about education in dramatic new ways, questioning the traditional modes of delivery, and changing the status quo. For me, that has meant teaching an English 59 course with a completely different approach to more quickly prepare students for college level work. It’s called “acceleration,” and I am joining faculty across the state in a movement that questions the need for long sequences of courses in Math and English to get students “ready” for college level. Evidence shows that students get stuck and demoralized in these sequences, often giving up on their goals. However, I think that when faculty believe in students’ capacity for excellence, then students can rise to a much higher level and achieve great things, as long as the necessary support for reaching those high expectations is provided. I have come to believe that the traditional approach to pre-college level course work represents a lack of faith in students’ ability to learn and grow. I have committed myself to developing a new course in English that is designed to prepare students for English 100 in just one semester, with no prerequisites. This will allow students to dream big and move quickly to realize their dreams of a college education. If I can be part of such a change, then I realize my own dream of being both an excellent teacher, bringing a challenging new curriculum to students, and an effective activist, making the whole system better for all the students who arrive at our doors, today and for years to come.

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