Teaching Philosophy

It is with a sense of gratitude and luck that I view my entry into the world of teaching. It was not something I aspired to as an undergraduate. Rather, my own drive to learn deeply, and to get under the skin of a subject, to learn it from the inside-out, has been the impetus which both led me to teaching and has guided my own pedagogical development.

During my year at Hollins College, studying for my MA, I encountered a classroom presence which has left its impress upon me, even over a decade later. I was lucky enough to take a course in the post-World War II novel from Professor Cathy Hankla. As a graduate of a large state university, the bulk of my coursework had previously been in large classes where instruction was mainly lecture-based. Hollins College’s tradition as a small liberal arts college was vastly different, and allowed for quite different pedagogical techniques.

The first few weeks in Professor Hankla’s class, I was out of my element: as students, we were expected to develop our critical faculties, not only for our own benefit, but for our classmates. We were held responsible for the quality of our experience, and were expected to attend to one another’s work and ideas with the same seriousness, devotion, and rigor with which we expected to be attended. She insisted upon, and elicited with great success, a classroom community.

And yet, I resisted this. I thought, somehow, that she was shirking her responsibility as an instructor. Where were the lectures? Why were we working in groups? Why did class seem fueled primarily by her questions and not her answers? Professor Hankla also required each student to pair with another over the course of the semester and lead that day’s discussion of the text. I was assigned The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje. Upon reading it through once, it was immediately apparent to me that I had no idea what was going on in this book. Normally, this would have been my cue to pay greater attention in class, and take down lecture notes. However, I had to help lead discussion this time. Not only did my partner and I have to gain insight into the text ourselves, we needed to find a way to help the rest of our classmates grapple with it and come to a greater understanding as well.

For me, this was a formative educational experience. By the time my partner and I presented on Ondaatje’s text, I understood the work better than any piece of literature I had encountered up to that point in time. I also learned in class how much others glean from a work that I have missed, and the ways in which this shared discovery can add to one’s own understanding and fuel our own critical and creative faculties. In short, I learned that the best way to learn and understand a subject is to teach it.

Since that year at Hollins College, I have continued to seek out opportunities to teach, in part to share my love of literature and writing with students, and in part out of my own selfish desire to continue deepening my own understanding and appreciation of literary texts. I continue to employ many of Professor Hankla’s methods which were so illuminating for me: student pairs are responsible for leading class discussion once each semester; I break students into small groups to grapple with specific textual or critical questions; and I lead full-class discussions with carefully-crafted questions designed to help students uncover the answers in the text for themselves. I believe understanding in which we actively engage is more meaningful than that which is passively received. It creates a feeling of success and enthusiasm within oneself as well, which will hopefully lead students to continue reading and thinking critically about issues outside of my classroom.

When I do lecture, I try to think it as a moment in which my expertise can provide a context for students’ own investigation of the work before us that day in class. Much as a Montessori teacher may seem to be doing little, observing her young charges, I strive to foster above all else an environment conducive to authentic student discovery and critical thinking.

Crucial to my teaching philosophy as well is my attitude toward the divide so commonly seen between “academics” and “creative writers,” as well as my view toward the somewhat arbitrary boundaries we draw between different literary genres. As a teacher and a writer, I resist such false dichotomies. I want for myself and for my students the possibility of writing in multiple genres and a willingness to blur the boundaries between poetry and prose if a project demands it.

My own schooling reveals my resistance to the idea of creative writing as its own island within a larger English Department, as well. I pursued a three-year MFA degree at George Mason University, which supplements its “studio” offerings with a rigorous investigation of literary tradition. From there, I went on to a doctoral program in English at the University of Missouri-Columbia. MU’s creative writing program allows its writers to complete their course of study with a creative dissertation, but the coursework previous to this, including the foreign language requirement and comprehensive exams, is identical to that of students who choose to write critical dissertations.

So while I have been schooled in the creative writing model which originated with the Iowa Writers Workshop, and recognize the many valuable elements of that model, I do not adhere to its every dictum. I believe not just that talent can be nurtured, but that the fundamentals of creative writing can be taught. The most effective way to learn to write is by reading. Our writing is always in conversation with other writers past and present. Thus, I view the “literature” classes I teach as connected to the writing work of my “workshops.” I have been fortunate to participate in courses which are a hybrid of the two, such as the poetry workshop for my Ph.D. which also focused on the critical history of aesthetics. We read and discussed classical theory from Plato and Aristotle, through Kant, to the present. At the same time, we were writing our own poems and workshopping them in class. At the end of the semester, each student produced both a poem which explicitly engaged the texts we’d been reading (although as the semester went on, the intersections between the theoretical issues we were engaged in and our own writing had already become increasingly visible), as well as a critical essay on an aesthetic issue.

In the workshop-intensive creative writing classes I have taught over the years, I like to think of our discussion of the work as a constructive critique not entirely in line with the generic workshop model. As a student and beginning teacher of creative writing, I found myself concerned about the workshop process. Often it seemed that the class would critique the particulars of a work without addressing its larger implications or intentions. I believe that the dictum against learning an author’s intentions at any point in the process, so frequently expressed in the rule against allowing a writer to speak at any point during the discussion of their piece, is rooted in a bias toward a particular style of writing: the first-person lyric-narrative free verse poem.

I prefer for the discussion of a particular piece to progress quite differently. My approach begins when the poem or story is distributed the week before it will be discussed. I ask students to first read the piece as though it were complete, finished, something they have stumbled across in an anthology or published book. They are first to give a close reading of the text, grappling with its ambiguities or confusions before labeling them as mistakes to be excised. They are then to proceed to the point of critique, highlighting places that seemed to contradict the general thrust of the work, images that could be sharpened, or moments where the sound or rhythm in a poem fall short of its potential.

We then open discussion of the work with their readings of it, trying to establish a shared sense of the piece and its ambitions. We recognize where it is most successful in achieving these goals before progressing to our suggestions for improvements. I ask the writer to listen and take notes on this discussion, so that the context for our suggestions is clear to her. Late in the workshop, I invite and encourage writers to share their intentions as well as ask specific questions to help guide the remainder of the discussion. Some students do not find this necessary. For others, in particular writers of a more “experimental” bent, this portion of the critique can be quite useful.

I believe the common prohibition against a writer speaking during workshop derives from the fear that it will be a mere defense of the work despite the group’s comments. But I have found that when a writer hears their poem or story being truly read, when they can see a group of people struggling to articulate its implications and themes, they do not feel the need for this sort of response. They feel that they have already been heard.

Finally, I try to model for students an active literary life: writing, reading, editing (I am Assistant Editor of the North American Review), and discussing works in informal groups. At the University of Northern Iowa, I have created an Emerging Writers Reading Series which features graduate students, writers with both regional and national profiles who have accumulated significant honors and publications (though not first books), and nationally-recognized writers who have succeeded in publishing their first books.

It is important for me as a teacher to connect with as many of my students as I can on an individual level, whether through brief conversations before or after class, meetings in office hours, or even chance meetings about campus. Since each student comes to the classroom with a diverse set of interests and experiences, I want to understand who they are as well as how they need to learn in the classroom. I am deeply committed to maintaining my classroom as a rigorous and canonically inclusive community, and to continuous pedagogical growth.