Since part of my teaching
duties consists of teaching essay writing, I will present a brief essay
that conveys what I believe as a teacher. I will give it the grand
title of “My Teaching Philosophy.” To wit:
What invigorates my teaching is the spirit of positive
optimism with which I strive to cultivate in students the ability and will
to recognize visible and hidden interconnections that exist among things
sublime, lowly, and disparate. I refer to students’ meaningful
learning process whereby they can mature emotionally through serious
self-reflection and intellectually by way of careful re-visioning their
immediate world and the larger world beyond it. I regard my teacher’s
role as a caretaker and an advocate, and as such I make sure of their
academic career on whose successful completion their various professional
aspirations in large part do hinge. It is my responsibility to
create a collaborative, fruitful learning community where students can
question and test accepted conventions, imagine and value diverse
perspectives, enlarge and reshape emotions and thoughts and, ultimately
see close connections between their acquired academic knowledge and the
content of their humanity as they embark on commerce with the real world.
A brief description of my teaching practice may further
clarify my philosophy. First, the teaching of composition: As a
practicing writer, I know writing begins from within involving the
integrity of one’s whole being. It is an arduous yet promising
journey of self-exploration, self-discovery, self-affirmation and, most
importantly, an often life-altering and fun way to bring oneself into the
light and vocalize a once submerged voice. For all these to result,
I encourage students to begin with careful, active, and committed
reading. It is my faith that reading is the first step to building
an intimate bond between the student and the written word. Diverse
reading materials will spur students’ inward, intellectual journey and
engage as a seedbed preparatory to good writing. My metaphor for the
actual writing process is that of building a house – a
step-by-internally-connecting-step – a binding process that concretizes
the primary premise of my teaching.
The same binding principle animates my specific
approach to teaching composition. Under the rubric of what I term
“an academic discourse through multiple selves as connected thinking,”
I teach writing for students not only to achieve vigorous and sustained
persuasion and argumentation but also to examine forms and expressions of
a writing self as a creative and disciplined subjectivity. I
encourage students to treat their writing self in dialogue with oneself
and the world. I also urge students to regard their various modes of
responses as intertextualizing a plurality of selves within them
accommodating several types of connected thinking: logical argument,
expressive persuasion, empirical inquiry, objective analysis, cultural
interrogation, and textual mediation of multiple positions and
voices. Thus, students are to discover alternative selves existing
within oneself, and writing becomes a cognitive dialogue of an open mind
constantly engaged in the reading and writing about other equally open
minds. Writing then can claim its efficacy as a redemptive site
charged with imagination, energy, adventure, existential and
epistemological challenge and promise, all coalescing into a civil and
intellectual acculturation.
My teaching literature also echoes my binding
philosophy as I often take interdisciplinary and intertextual
approaches. Under the rubric of what I term textual historicism, I
teach fiction, poetry, and drama for their formal genre studies as well as
for their para-literary matters large and small. Treating literary
texts as historical documents, I fashion my literature courses in two
ways: one, under one overarching theme that forges an alliance between
history and literature, and the other, by combining classics and popular
texts together. Such approaches are fruitful to students because
they are asked to discover concealed interconnections between a particular
historic context and relevant insights great writings are capable of
illuminating. Students can also review literary classics in a
refreshed light of the contemporary works inspired by new, original muses,
thus heightening their sense of themselves as historic participants.
My final goal is to promote students’ literacy by way of reentry into
the world of reading, a world where educated dialogue and genuine rapport
may be possible among what is simmering across what the poet Hopkins
called “pied beauty” of the diverse human landscapes.
I enjoy teaching because my students and I can write
fairy tales of heart-and-mind connections equal in quality to such
classics as Plato’s Dialogues, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Spark’s Prime of
Miss Brodie, Hilton’s Goodbye Mr. Chips, Schulman’s Dead Poets
Society, or Damon and Affleck’s Good Will Hunting. I enjoy
teaching because I take my teaching seriously. Indeed, it is not an
exaggeration to state that teachers can make or break students’
futures. I consider it my implicit charge to ensure their strong
commitment to learning, and promote standards of excellence, while
demanding of myself the same perseverance, quality, and self-discipline I
expect from my students. I have learned to temper enthusiasm with
empathy, discipline with good humor, and vision with pragmatism that
includes my emerging computer skills. Often drawing on my optimism
that has enabled me to create my version of the American dream, I press
on, forging and flourishing a professional life in the academic community
of the College of DuPage.
A brief description of my teaching practice may further
clarify my philosophy. First, the teaching of composition: As a
practicing writer, I know writing begins from within involving the
integrity of one’s whole being. It is an arduous yet promising
journey of self-exploration, self-discovery, self-affirmation and, most
importantly, an often life-altering and fun way to bring oneself into the
light and vocalize a once submerged voice. For all these to result,
I encourage students to begin with careful, active, and committed
reading. It is my faith that reading is the first step to building
an intimate bond between the student and the written word. Diverse
reading materials will spur students’ inward, intellectual journey and
engage as a seedbed preparatory to good writing. My metaphor for the
actual writing process is that of building a house – a
step-by-internally-connecting-step – a binding process that concretizes
the primary premise of my teaching.
My teaching literature also echoes my binding
philosophy as I often take interdisciplinary and intertextual
approaches. Under the rubric of what I term textual historicism, I
teach fiction, poetry, and drama for their formal genre studies as well as
for their para-literary matters large and small. Treating literary
texts as historical documents, I fashion my literature courses in two
ways: one, under one overarching theme that forges an alliance between
history and literature, and the other, by combining classics and popular
texts together. Such approaches are fruitful to students because
they are asked to discover concealed interconnections between a particular
historic context and relevant insights great writings are capable of
illuminating. Students can also review literary classics in a
refreshed light of the contemporary works inspired by new, original muses,
thus heightening their sense of themselves as historic participants.
My final goal is to promote students’ literacy by way of reentry into
the world of reading, a world where educated dialogue and genuine rapport
may be possible among what is simmering across what the poet Hopkins
called “pied beauty” of the diverse human landscapes. 
I enjoy teaching because my students and I can write
fairy tales of heart-and-mind connections equal in quality to such
classics as Plato’s Dialogues, Bronte’s Jane Eyre, Spark’s Prime of
Miss Brodie, Hilton’s Goodbye Mr. Chips, Schulman’s Dead Poets
Society, or Damon and Affleck’s Good Will Hunting. I enjoy
teaching because I take my teaching seriously. Indeed, it is not an
exaggeration to state that teachers can make or break students’
futures. I consider it my implicit charge to ensure their strong
commitment to learning, and promote standards of excellence, while
demanding of myself the same perseverance, quality, and self-discipline I
expect from my students. I have learned to temper enthusiasm with
empathy, discipline with good humor, and vision with pragmatism that
includes my emerging computer skills. Often drawing on my optimism
that has enabled me to create my version of the American dream, I press
on, forging and flourishing a professional life in the academic community
of the College of DuPage.