Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Hunley 1

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Karen Hunley

I have always loved reading and writing, so it can be easy for me to forget that not everyone has this same fulfilling relationship with written language. But I know that many freshman students have a sense of dread about composition courses, often viewing them as difficult and unnecessary to their perceived career goals. It is my goal to change this outlook ? not necessarily to make every student love writing but to convince them to feel more comfortable with it and more confident in their composition skills. I want students to learn to capitalize on the writing they may choose to do outside school, like poetry, fiction, and journalism, often done with hopes of a career that reflects these passions. It's important to me to show students that writing is not all about strict rules and staying within parameters set by the teacher, but rather it can also be an opportunity to individually express themselves and effectively communicate with others. Before they can do this, however, I feel it's my responsibility to bridge the gap they may perceive between literacies with which they are already familiar and academic writing.

For most students, the idea of a literate self outside an academic environment is foreign; they do not see their community literacies as "real" reading and writing. As Shannon Carter says in her book, The Way Literacy Lives, our society traditionally treats literacy as "a single bundle of skills" that can be easily transferred from one context to another. I agree with her stance that, instead, literacy is "entirely dependent on context" and that students can more effectively "read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes" of the academic community through analyzing familiar communities of literacy practice. By incorporating vernaculars in the classroom, I hope to not only help students see the value in these forms of communication, but teach them how to use literacy skills they already have to acquire academic literacy. I want to help them see that a strong sense of academic literacy is necessary to successfully maneuver through four years of college and then graduate school or the job application process, whichever path they choose. (Their lives after college may or may not be reliant upon an intricate knowledge of academic literacy.) But I feel they also need to use and feel comfortable with their vernaculars in order to sustain and even foster growth of their literate selves outside the university.

One of my assignments that helps students make connections between different forms of literacy, as well as recognize the relevance of their vernaculars, is a personal narrative essay in which they are asked to write about experiences with outside-school literacies. These literacies, as I explain to students, could be attached to video games, comic books, poetry, sports teams, diaries, part-time jobs, and many more genres. This would make them aware of the writing and/or "reading" of texts they perform in contexts beyond school, which I hope would initially cause students to view literacy in more positive way. Instead of harshly grading on mechanics and format right from the start, I expect students' understanding of these rules to improve during the course through one-on-one conferences and written comments on their papers. Additionally, I hope in-class journal assignments, without specific parameters on topic or format, would ignite creativity and help students discover more about themselves through writing.

Hunley 2

As significant as I believe vernacular dialects are within the contexts in which they were developed and for maintaining a diverse, colorful society, my main classroom goal is to help students successfully transfer what they already know about these alternative dialects to an academic context. I believe they need a mostly structured, teacher-led environment with assignments that will help prepare them for academic writing beyond my class. While students do have the opportunity to express themselves in journals and the personal narrative essay, they will also learn more about formal academic writing, specifically how to effectively write for an audience. As James Berlin posits in his essay "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories," they need to learn to create their own meaning and be "a shaper of reality, rather than a passive receptor of the immutably given." By educating students about the rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos and instructing them use these appeals in an essay, I aim to give students the power to persuade an audience, to construct their own truths. Through in-class activities on thesis statements and providing evidence, students will also learn the components of an unequivocal and interesting argument. These are standard elements of academic writing that will be expected of them throughout college, and subsequent instructors will likely expect students to already know how to write at a certain level.

In acquiring effective rhetorical writing skills and, therefore, acquiring academic literacy, students should be able to situate themselves more comfortably within the academic community, or "invent the university," as David Bartholomae would say. He explains that a student has to "appropriate (or be appropriated by) a specialized discourse, and he has to do this ... as though he were a member of the academy." While I do not believe that academic discourse is superior to all other discourse in all contexts, it is a unique and privileged form that I want to help my students master in order to be successful in school and quite possibly in the workplace. Just as importantly, the language of the academy is the language of power, the one that can most easily affect change. I feel it is my responsibility to give students as much help as possible in obtaining this powerful discourse so that their voices can be heard, specifically the questions I hope they'll learn to ask about the historically unequal forms of literacy.

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