TEACHING STATEMENT
In my second year of teaching in K-12, I taught AP US History to a group of 11th grade students. One student was diligently taking notes and asking questions about the schedule, workload, and extra credit opportunities. I commented that she must be eager to pass the test. She responded, “Oh, I’m not going to pass.” I could not comprehend how a student taking an AP class, who was clearly a hard worker, didn’t have confidence in their ability to pass this test. When I think about my teaching philosophy, I think about this student and how I wish I had known then what I know now.
I have similar goals now as I did then, but as my education has progressed and I have gained more experience, my approach to teaching has changed. One of my goals is still to have students build up their academic confidence, and I will accomplish this by facilitating students’ epistemic abilities by centering constructivist pedagogical theory. Students learn by doing and by participating in knowledge creation. Epistemic skills take time to define, explore, and develop as a class. This exploration takes different forms. It could look like class discussions where students negotiate the meaning of a curated selection of texts where I act as a guide to keep the discussion on topic rather than the enforcer for a particular interpretation.
While my teaching prioritizes constructivism, expressivist insights inform it. Students write best when they write reflexively; when they write about what they know. To guide students to this place, I use a process-based curriculum, centering a path towards reflexivity with exploration and self-reflection. In first-year composition, the subject that students can most readily access and discuss is themselves. Students keep a writing log, collecting primary evidence of their writing process. They will explore their writing influences, and they will write about their experiences with writing. All these assignments culminate in a final writing process paper where students lay out everything they have learned about their writing process. By examining their relationship with writing and their own writing process, students develop the skills and identify the patterns that lead to their best writing, but it also opens the door to deeper exploration of not just the self, but the self in relation to the world. This reflection leads to a deconstruction of students’ preconceived notions and biases, which opens the door to identifying these realities in the information ecosystem that they inhabit.
Feedback is essential to my curriculum and pedagogy. In my class, feedback is a two-way street. One side of the street comes from the instructor. I use multimodality in my feedback to facilitate deeper engagement with the revision process, focusing on content over mechanics, and finding the successes in a paper as well as the areas of improvement. The other lane comes from the students. I encourage students to participate by utilizing feedback reflections in which students identify why and how they would or would not use a piece of feedback on their next draft. In this process, feedback is a dialogue that students are a part of rather than something that is dictated to them. Students have engaged more thoughtfully and deeply with a piece of writing while simultaneously practicing the work of revision. All of these different elements of my teaching are a response to the often times negative history of composition in higher education.
The history of composition is rife with gatekeeping, discriminatory practices, and linguistic colonization, which makes it even more important that as a member of the discipline, I seek to write these wrongs in the classroom. My pedagogy guides students through the deconstruction and analysis of not just their relationship to writing and their writing process, but any and all prejudices, biases or preconceived notions. I use my research to help students develop critical-thinking skills. Not only will students reflect on their own biases, but they will see these where biases are manifested in the real world as we reflect on AI’s increasing role in the world and the impact of disinformation on minoritized communities.
In practice, this looks like:
- Building relationships with students by meeting them where they are at, understanding the needs of all learners, and mitigating the stress and fears that all students face but particularly minoritized and nontraditional students.
- Facilitating a process-based approach where assignments are explicitly defined, build on one another, promote metacognition, and provide opportunities for feedback and self-reflection.
- Providing timely feedback that is student-centered, dialogic, and multimodal using digital tools to deliver video and sound.
- Encouraging students to use multimodality in the construction of texts to practice digital literacy, expand access, encourage a diversity of expression, and expand student awareness of the rhetorical situation they are engaging with.
These practices help to create a writing community where social justice is prioritized, and students build the skills to be critical and conscientious citizens.
While I am not the same teacher as I was years ago, I am still informed by those experiences. The time in K-12 gave me valuable insight into the educator I want to be. Now I am equipped with the theory and pedagogy that will allow me to nurture student growth at the college level.
Pedagogy Interview and Reflection
This paper reflects on the goals and practices of First Year Composition (FYC) through coursework in ENG 101 and ENG 510 alongside a classroom observation and interview with Professor Austin Fricke. I draw on scholarship in writing studies and composition pedagogy to argue that effective FYC instruction depends on student-centered practices that emphasize reflection, metacognition, dialogic feedback, and sustained engagement with the writing process. Fricke’s classroom showed me how we as educators can create supportive learning environments that elevate student voice, encourage critical thinking, and foster trust through vulnerability and collaboration. I examine how reflective assignments and process-based writing help students develop transferable metacognitive skills. I also explore the role of revision and feedback in promoting long-term student growth. I believe that feedback should function as an ongoing dialogue rather than a one-sided evaluation. All of these different elements increase instructor presence and promotes meaningful engagement which, while creating an effective learning environment, mitigates student reliance on AI. Ultimately, this reflection advocates for a constructivist approach to FYC that prioritizes growth over product, encourages students to become active meaning-makers, and positions writing as a tool for learning, agency, and personal development. This paper had a big influence on my teaching statement and highlights the development of my current teaching philosophy.
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