TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

Shaviro’s statement is an exemplary description of the interdisciplinary terrain where rhetoric and writing teachers take on the challenge of training students in diverse social and disciplinary ‘response-abilities.’  Throughout my training at the University of Windsor and Wayne State, and my teaching experiences in England and Toronto, I have leaned on a number of our field’s robust pedagogies.  In many respects, my teaching philosophy hinges on matching our methods with certain ‘attitude’ – or as Burke said, “an attitude embodied in a method” (GM 441). Burke’s comic attitude (“an attitude embracing many attitudes”) encourages a playful attitude toward life — “life as an infinite game where the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, and to keep everyone in play” — rather than as a finite game, a game “played for the purpose of ending the game with a victory or defeat.”  The right attitudes buttress our ‘coaching’ of students through stages of researching and writing, communicate with students that their ‘essay’ requires effort, and motivate them to extend their skills toward larger professional, social, and cultural audiences.  The right 'comic attitude' is, as Bergson said, something that creates "a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to intelligence, pure and simple."  I want my students to see the course as a fundamental beginning to a new attitude towards learning, writing, and intelligence. 

 

In my classrooms students are encouraged to make themselves heard in a variety of contexts and expected to become fluent in diverse modes of rhetorical work.  I attempt to make students aware of the ‘wing-spread’ of rhetoric and conscious of writing’s value in and across disciplines and social spaces.  While negotiating the ideals of a de-centered and practice-based classroom, I hope to ‘keep everyone in play’ by putting students in conversation with real audiences by ‘open sourcing’ their writing during various stages of writing to other students and publics.  Pushing students to make their work public at various stages also requires an attitude of openness and generosity -- one that can mitigate imbalances and conflicts, narrow the gap with an authority figure, and help them encounter diverse and challenging audiences. 

 

I believe that as we challenge students with rhetorical concepts and critical thinking, we should also take into account students’ pragmatic or careerist orientations.  In other words, I accept much of what Russel Durst refers to as a policy of “reflective instrumentalism.”  Durst argues for writing courses to be places of negotiation between student and teacher expectations, and points out that “we create a large gulf between ourselves and our students by not respecting their goals” and we lose their cooperation (176).  Over the past few years, students’ career goals and aspirations for high grades seem to be matched by their feelings of vulnerability to rapid technological and economic changes and the uncertainties they face in the future.  In Writing at the End of the World, Richard Miller argues that students currently feel connected by their vulnerability to the future and an amorphous “idle hope” (22).  Like Miller, I believe that that this charges our responsibilities as teachers to answer a call for a bold and critical optimism in our attitudes and our writing, and for programs to respond to the question: “Can secular institutions of higher education be taught to use writing to foster a kind of critical optimism that is able to transform idle feelings of hope into viable plans for sustainable action?”(27)