My Teaching Philosophy “What if we joined our wildernesses together?” —‘Bethany’ via Ross Gay, The Book of Delights
I don’t look for it on purpose, but since becoming a teacher, I’ve begun to find pedagogy everywhere. Many of these moments are fleeting thoughts about how I might structure a poetry lesson or why the ideals of a summer camp are important in a classroom, but as I was reading Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights, I found myself face to face with an explicitly stated pedagogy—one so perfect that I wrote it down, yelled it across the apartment to my partner, and referred to it in conversation twice within the week.
“What if we joined our wildernesses together?” As I explore this question and repeat it, mantra-like, in my life, I continually return to two words, ‘together’ and ‘wildernesses,’ and wonder how we might honor them both simultaneously. The more I think about teaching—and perhaps more importantly, the more I actually teach—the more I see it as a job focused on community-building. In a supportive community, each member’s ‘wilderness’ is understood to be real and valid. Each member is seen and valued for their complexities. But each member is also seen as a part of the larger, stronger whole. In a supportive community, people are uplifted by the fact of each other’s love. Thus, a critical part of our job as teachers is to create loving classroom communities that can bring out both the beauty of “wilderness” and the strength of “together.” My classroom, my teaching philosophy, and my understanding of how to bridge our wildernesses are all rooted in structure. In my classroom, that structure comes in the form of activities that occur daily or weekly. Students begin each day with work focused on literacy and critical thinking skills that is rooted in their funds of knowledge. Every day, for example, we read. Sometimes this will be independent, sometimes class-wide—and often it will be both of these in one day—but either way, we will continually practice the art and science of reading. In addition to this, ’Music Monday’ centers the practice of annotation techniques and brief analytical writing using song lyrics of students’ choosing. On Tuesdays, we spend time transferring words from our class-wide ‘Word Wall’ to our ‘Personal Dictionaries’—public and personal guides to academic language that are co-created by students and myself, and can be used to reinforce or reteach previous lessons as well as to preview new content. Wednesdays usher in discussions that range from a less structured ‘Walk and Talk’ to a highly structured ‘Socratic Seminar.’ We review (and sometimes take a quiz on) vocabulary and grammar on Thursdays. And on Fridays, ‘Anything Letters’ serve both as writing practice and as a social-emotional check-in. All of these structures provide consistency for students. They don’t take up much of the class’ time together, but they provide a starting point with which every student can become familiar. This consistency in structure improves efficiency in the classroom (students spend less time thinking about an activity’s structure and more time thinking about its content) but it also adds a sense of comfort and stability to the classroom environment. When students are confident and know what is expected of them, they no longer have to guess at what they will be doing or how they will be judged. And with these anxieties assuaged, students can engage more fully with the content and with each other. Beyond all of this, these daily structures also provide us, as teachers, with a critically important opportunity: to make visible the many other structures our students face daily. These structures deal with everything from reading comprehension to economics; from analytical writing to politics. They underlie our everyday interactions, and it is our job to look directly and critically at these structures, and to push those around us to do the same. When teaching literature, this means making explicit the patterns of thinking that strong readers use, and it also means using those patterns of thinking to explore texts that speak to and broaden students’ experiences. When teaching writing, this means making explicit the structure of an analytical essay, and it also means turning that essay’s lens towards students’ daily worlds. Making these structures explicit for our students provides them with the tools to succeed academically, but more importantly, it provides them with the tools to think critically about the world around them—a world that we must push them to critique and analyze constantly. We must push our students—and have them push us—to see, as Ibram X. Kendi puts it, the “policies lurking behind the struggles of people.” After all, a student’s potential depends less on how many vocabulary words they might learn, and more on how they might use those words. The more I think about this, the more I see the humanities as subjects imbued with urgency. Literature and history have long been the lens through which we have studied ‘humanity’ in this country, and they have also long been used to hide, misrepresent, and dehumanize students based on race, ability, gender, sexuality, and much more. Our classrooms should fight this history by being places of creation and collaboration. They should be places in which we can encounter perspectives—both in the texts we read and the conversations we have—and collectively build new understandings and knowledge from them. And when we think critically about all of these structures, we can begin to create communities in which this is true. We can begin to create communities in which our wildernesses can be joined together into something new and stronger and bent on the relentless pursuit of seeing and empathizing and clarifying and existing and thinking. Communities in which we read and write and carry on the project of making this world more just and more human and more whole. |