Teaching Philosophy Statement

Filed in Teaching with Technology Portfolio

In his novel Galatea 2.2, Richard Powers presents a pedagogical experience quite familiar to English teachers. The protagonist—an academic-in-training-turned-novelist who spends a year teaching introductory English composition as a Masters candidate—laments his students’ production of routine, indifferent essays. His diagnosis of the underlying problem would likely draw sympathy from many English instructors: “My eighteen-year-olds never believed that the reader was real, that they themselves were real, that the world’s topics were real. That they had to insist as much, in so many words.”¹ The teacher’s hunger for the real from their students involves a rejection of familiar exercises, of banal retreads, in favor of some exciting reimagining.

What the protagonist of Galatea 2.2 wants, in the language of my discipline, is for students to defamiliarize the world—to make it new, as another famous literary catchphrase goes. In English literary studies, the idea of defamiliarization—the aesthetic technique by which familiar concepts or objects are given a fresh, striking perspective—is venerated. For literary critics, literature's capacity to defamiliarize is its own special pedagogy: it is what enables literature to teach readers new ways of thinking about what is taken for granted. But many students, confronting literature or any other subject, experience learning as already defamiliarized; for one reason or another, the material they are tasked with learning feels unassimilable to what they already know. Unless this paradox of learning is directly addressed in the classroom, it can lead students to detach from and avoid engaging with material. What students learn, in this scenario, is not promising or rewarding: that some subjects "aren't for me," that they themselves just aren't smart enough, that they missed something critical along the way.

The usual antidote to student detachment and rote essay-writing prescribed by pedagogical counsel is to insist on students’ particular perspectives and voices, and remind them just how particular they are, with the expectation that such an insistence will somewhat naturally yield essays that sparkle with originality and feeling (if not grammatical perfection). This is, by all means, a sensible and useful approach, but it doesn’t quite address the underlying problem at hand. For as many essays as English teachers get that showcase on the page a student’s invested sincerity in a topic, there is at least triple that amount of essays that take a student’s genuine interest in a subject and grind it into yet another routine operation. The verve with which a student might insist upon Cristiano Ronaldo’s all-time football greatness in conversation with their Lionel-Messi-loving roommate very often does not make the translation onto the double-spaced pages of the essay covering the same topic.

In such a case, the student has done nothing wrong; indeed, the student has done what best pedagogical practice has advised us we encourage them to do: write about what you care about. The issue, however, is the contextual metamorphosis that occurs between feeling something in the world and writing about it in the classroom, which every student and teacher knows happens but which almost all of them ignores. For most students—because they have been quite literally schooled in this way—the classroom is a vacuum; it doesn’t just seal off the world, but also initiates alternative conditions of being, just as, if you stepped into the vacuum of space, you too would sorely need some alternative measures to continue existing.

Luckily, unlike the vacuum of space, the classroom is much more forgiving. My goal as a teacher is to make the classroom a straightforward confrontation with the disconnect that underpins students’ default relationship to schooling. I therefore practice a pedagogy of refamiliarization, whereby what seems completely alien and totally inaccessible to students is made the occasion for knowledge-building using the skills and knowledge base students currently possess. Ultimately, my teaching aims to show students how much their lives connect to the world around them, and to give them practice in identifying and elaborating those connections, even when they seem unlikely. When this practice becomes familiar, students are equipped to flourish in any unfamiliar terrain. They are equipped, in short, to learn.

I conduct my classroom in specific ways to develop the practice of refamiliarization. Most critically, I prioritize large class discussions because that format is where I am best positioned to engage with my students as a collaborator in knowledge production, rather than as a font of lecture content (although, when the opportunity calls, I am known to readily expound). I’ve found that this format best emphasizes the stakes of a lesson; it is more important for students to see instructors as peers in knowledge building than it is for them to know course learning outcomes. The teacher, in my classroom, becomes refamiliarized as a person who has questions, doesn’t know every “right” answer, and trades evaluative judgment for curious consideration.

This mode of collaboration, moreover, emphasizes the process of reading just as much as discussion. As a teacher today, it is impossible to avoid the complaint that students do not do the reading. However true this generalization might be, I believe students’ individual reading should not substitute for the collective reading I model in the classroom. No reading is ever “complete,” as if doing the reading unlocks some other level that the classroom represents. By contrast, the classroom is, in a sense, a live reading in action, and I practice this quite literally. I read outloud to my students; I ask them to read outloud to each other. When we encounter a difficult or significant point, we’ll read it again and again—we’ll repeat keywords, phrases, sentences, passages, working them over together. When our discussion moves on and drifts briefly away from written words, I’ll connect students’ thoughts back to the language they have just recently read, demonstrating their intuitive correspondence with the writers we cover.

Additionally, the refamiliarization I aim to accomplish in teaching demands that I approach material in ways that emphasize the contact points with students’ common cultural knowledge. For example, when I teach literary and critical theory—notoriously difficult for students not only because the material itself is multidisciplinary and conceptually (and often linguistically) complex, but also because it initially appears to be so indissoluble with the everyday lives students lead—I link the major conceptual questions tackled by theorists to aspects of the world that more immediately resonate with students. I have taught Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage psychology as a commentary on social media, Judith Butler’s gender performativity beside Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way,” and Michel Foucault’s theory of power in the context of war simulation video games.

This tactic involves a delicate balancing act: it risks sacrificing the firsthand engagement with the material for a secondhand analogy that strips the original ideas of their crucial context and full depth. It is never fully successful, as few things in teaching ever are. However, when the bet pays off, students recognize as familiar what once could not have been more strange. That recognition is just as valuable as, if not more valuable than, the raw material students learn, because it indicates both students’ confidence in synthesizing ideas across contexts, and the possibilities for creative thinking that such synthesis opens up. It’s this recognition that all of my courses aspire to produce, class after class, until it is as familiar to students as air, rushing strong and relieving into the vacuum.

Above all, that is what the work of refamiliarization is: it is what rebuilds the common ground that everyone shares, and on which the possibility of thinking critically and acting responsibly depends. It is, like untangling the knot of a difficult theory or decoding the symbol of a complex literary image, always unending—which is to say, always ready to be reinvented, redeployed, reconstituted. Teaching is the constant reminder of the necessity of such reflexivity; students come and go, but the classroom remains. So does the goal: to turn it from an exception to what’s real—a vacuum sealed off from the world—into the space where what’s real is refamiliarized, so that it may be reconsidered.

Next, read my Reflections on Teaching with Technology.

Notes