Statement of Teaching Philosophy

by

Janine L. Certo, Ph.D.

In T.S. Eliot’s poem, East Coker (1940), the speaker reminds us that we should not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. For me, exploration epitomizes an open spirit of inquiry. I view each academic year as a small “arrival,” moving gradually toward more discovery and impact in teaching. My pedagogical interests include helping preservice and inservice teachers learn about the teaching of writing, especially poetry, to children and adolescents. In order for my students to be successful as future teachers, they must have a developing sense of genre knowledge. They must have knowledge about genre, writers, children’s development and abilities, and writing curriculum and instruction. They must be able to locate, interpret, analyze, read, respond to, and write in the genre, and teach students with diverse interests and backgrounds to do so. They must possess positive attitudes about writing, write for themselves, and be confident as writers and teachers of writing. Because this is a tall order, teachers must, at a minimum, be skilled in analyzing their own teaching, their own writing, their students’ writing, and be committed to ongoing professional development.

I identify six major hallmarksof my formal university teaching (the first three I see as highly interrelated). They include: 1) developing teachers as writers and instilling/modeling a lifelong love of writing, 2)a genre approach to teaching writing, 3)authentic assessment, 4) diversity, 5) action research and

6) technology. These methods and hallmarks contribute to my goals for students because they are nested in a constructivist learning environment(Philips & Early, 2000), which ischaracterized by promotion of inquiry among learners, recognition of student autonomy and leadership, promotion of dialogue between students and students and students and teachers, and allowance for authentic work. The hallmarks also acknowledge learner-centered teaching, which focuses attention on what the student is learning, how the student is learning, the conditions under which the student is learning, whether the student is retaining and applying the learning, and how current learning positions the student for future learning(Huba & Freed, 1999; Weimer, 2002).

A hallmark of my writing/reading pedagogy is to develop teachers as writers and to instill and model a lifelong love of writing. For example, I purposefully plan how to instill a love of writing in my students, so that dispositions and instruction might be reflected and tested in their classrooms and schools. To accomplish this, I create a workshop setting where all participants, including myself, engage in the writing process experimenting with the genres. One intern wrote on a mid-term evaluation: “You’re very responsive to our needs and ideas. Things we do in class are both interesting and practical. I also love the fact that this class not only makes me excited about teaching writing, but it makes me go home and write, too.”

A similar environment is created with a graduatewriting course I teach,that showcases two other hallmarks of my teaching: a genre approach to teaching writing--which recognizes that a writer crafts a text with a purpose or audience in mind (Cope and Kalantzis, 1993)--and authentic assessment, or assessment mirroring real-world products or performances in the discipline. Following the National Writing Project Model, we all engage in the entire writing process ourselves. Using the work of Elbow and Belanoff (2000), students share their writings with each other and me offering supportive and critical feedback. Among the assignments, students keep a Writing Portfolio with some form of exposition (action research paper, review of literature or argumentative essay) and several poems. To address students’ diverse interests, they also select two other genres to visit from a suggested list including: essay on a subject that moves them, biographical essay, art/literary criticism, fiction (short story, children’s book, scenes from a novel), personal narrative/memoir, letter, obituary, orgrant proposal. Rubrics or scoring guides are co-created with students as appropriate, and evaluation weights heavily on their revision and reflective processes. For example, students keep“a writer’s memo” for these genres that is reflective in nature to understand writing processes and strategies and to internalize implications for teaching and working with child and adolescent writers. Sequentially-dated major revisions of each writing--from early drafts to later works—arealso submitted as evidence of improved writing. I view a teacher as a lifelong learner; thus, students in all my courses practice and improve on the craft of writing. Students in my poetry course apply similar elements of writing and reflection in a Poetry Portfolio. This coursearticulates the complex relationship between reading and writing, both for preservice teachers as readers and writers, and for children and adolescents. All of us participate in an end-of-course poetry reading, Trillium, on campus as an authentic performance. I personally write poems of my own in the course, and invite students out to local poetry readings where we read them.

Diversity is also a cornerstone of my teaching. In my discipline, I am continually striving to update my library to include literature by diverse authors and literature about diverse themes and subjects. Variety of authors and topics by gender, race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and sexual/lifestyle orientation are important so that preservice teachers help their own students to see themselves and others in literature. My notion of diversity also extends to providing spaces that allow students to communicate orally or in writing in a form or hybrid form of their strength. In my case, this might be ways of performing a poem (from recitation to slam style) or drawing on visual stimuli and/or direct experience for writing. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences documents that students learn in a variety of ways, for example visual, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, inter or intra personal, linguistic, and so forth (Gardner, 1991). In my teaching I try to both develop many of these intelligences in individual students, but to give students an opportunity to work in an area of strength or with tools and materials to help them connect with the content, in my case, writing or poetry. For example, in the poetry course, I experimented with the innovation of writing poems from viewing art. While these approachesare not necessarily the best way into poetry writing for all students, they provide spaces for students’ different learning styles (Smith & Kolb, 1986). In all of my courses, teachers must select three diverse (gender, ethnicity, ability, interest, etc.) focal students to analyze and reflect on their work more closely. I also regularly share my own collaborative action research on poetry writing from the field, discussing challenges and learnings as a result of addressing the needs of linguistically and culturally-diverse writers.

Just as I study my own teaching systematically by engaging in Boyer’s notion of the scholarship of teaching (1990) (to deeply assess what it is that students actually learn from my teaching and the learning environments I work to create), so do my students. Their interests and questions are visited through action research, or some form of teacher inquiry, in my courses. In an internship-level course, the Literacy Planning, Teaching and Reflection project involves interns “trying something new” in their cooperating teachers’ classroom, the spirit of which implies leadership as interns have the opportunity to influence the learning of veteran teachers. My teaching in the undergraduate literacy program influenced how I thought about my graduate teaching. Graduate students create a Demonstration Project on a subject they are willing to research, develop, and work into a presentation. The presentation includes a balanced mixture of theory/research, hands-on activity, and discussion of the theory/research and the activity. For those students who are practicing teachers, an inquiry option is encouraged so they can test the approach in their own classrooms.

Lastly, in my teaching I value the role oftechnologyin individuals’ literacy lives. I incorporate use of Powerpoint, the internet, video, audio and web-based literacy technologies on a regular basis as appropriate. Students are engaged with productivity tools literacy including Word processing, Presentation software, and web publishing. They are engage in information literacy-searching and using online card catalog systems and electronic resources. I have always been drawn to the power of technology for composing, representing and sharing with the world community. If I claim to have research and teaching interests in writing, I must acknowledge writing in digital environments. For my online graduate writing course, I work to create an aesthetically-pleasing course site with an attractive webpage with images, links to the web, to podcasts and to my personal webpage. I push myself and my students to try new technologies. I am going beyond text, to using introductory videos, podcasts, and blogs. I implemented online book clubs where students choose among several texts in each genre module and participate in discussion forums. They complete a teacher research project all semester on writing and participate in a genre exploration project, where they come closer to knowing criteria and experiences of two genres new to them.

This statement allows me to appreciate how the teaching philosophy statement is a live document. Indeed, teaching itself is alive. This statement is educative in that it offers me an emerging identity as a teacher of higher education. It is also a touchstone, bothto remain accountable to my values and to strive for improvement as language, technology, society, and, of course, the scholarship of teaching, changes. I look forward, with each course I plan and teach, to an arrival. . . to making an ever-growing impact on educators, children and adolescents. I have expertise and enthusiasm as a teacher with writing, poetry, and teacher education and development, and through work and reflection, I hope to make pedagogical impact locally, nationally and globally.

Acknowledgments

With gratitude to Dr. Deborah DeZure, Assistant Provost for Faculty Organization and Development at Michigan State University, and the 2007-2008 MSU Lilly Fellows (Ravi Bhavnani, Rita “Kiki” Edozie, Leigh VanHandel, Chet A. Morrison, and Tina Timm) whose thoughtful feedback helped to shape the initial draft of this statement.

References

Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship revisited. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Cope, B. & Kalantzis, M. (1993). The powers of literacy: A genre approach to teaching writing. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.

Elbow, P. & Belanoff, P. (2000). Sharing and responding (third edition). Boston: McGraw-Hill.

Gardner, H. (1991). The unschooled mind: How children think and how schools should teach. New York: Basic Books.

Huba, M. and Freed, J. (1999). Learner-centered assessment on college campuses: Shifting the focus from teaching to learning. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Philips, D. C. & Early, M. (2000). Constructivism in education. Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (Vol 99, Part 1). University of Chicago Press.

Smith, D. M., & Kolb, D. A. User’s Guide for the Learning Style Inventory: A Manual for Teachers and Trainers, Boston: McBer, 1986.

Weimer. M. (2002). Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

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