Saturday June 30th - DeVoss (Finally went multimodal with this one)

The beginning of this article reminded me of my job search this past year in which I wrote my first philosophical statement on teaching (tried to attach a PDF at the end of this post but couldn't figure it out - need some help!). I remember having a difficult time with this because I felt that I had a lot to talk about and it would end up going beyond the word/page expectation of those reading it. Also, having never written anything like a statement on teaching as well as never having been taught or exposed to them, it was difficult to be sure what information mattered most. The main question I had (still have) was: how do you balance between the theoretical and the practical? Should this be a philosophical treatise on my vision of what true education is and the ideal teacher that I strive to be, or should it be more tangible like a narrative version of a resume? It’s a balance that I still try to work out and will come back to the next time I write a teaching statement. Anyway, I thought it was interesting to read in this article that the participants practiced writing statements that were a paragraph in length - those exercises in concision are helpful with many different kinds of writing.

Peter Elbow’s quote on page 26 of the article resonates with me: “the main thing I’ve come to believe...is that better teaching behavior comes primarily from exploring one’s own teaching from an experiential and phenomenological point of view” (26). The opportunity that teachers have to reflect and refine their practice is an aspect I appreciate most about being a teacher. Every day, week, month, and year we have the chance to change what we did previously, and Elbow’s emphasis on relying on phenomenology for this is encouraging; after all, it isn’t that difficult to look back on a class and gauge whether it was successful or not and why.

The list of questions on page 28 that students in the MSU course reflected upon were interesting to look at. One of them in particular reminded me of Brenda Bruggeman’s course at Bread Loaf Vermont in 2016 in which she asked us to draw our writing process with colored pencils and markers. Similarly, one question listed is, “What does your current digital writing environment look like?” I feel that a visual will work better than alphabetic text to answer:

My desk! (Not really mine)

Now that I think about it, the physical space/environment is very important to me as a writer. I’ve seen people who bring their laptops outside and do work laying on a blanket in the grass when it’s 90 degrees out which is something I could never do. I need a very controlled, peaceful, and organized environment, preferably listening to instrumental music in the background. This is probably an important question to ask because your habits as a writer are reflected in more than your actual writing. Being reflective about something like the space you prefer to work in reveals something about yourself as a writer and teacher.

To conclude, I am excited to try to remediate my teaching philosophy statement. At this point I have no idea what it is going to look like or how I am going to figure that out, but reading the accounts of the people mentioned in this article it sounds like a valuable experience. I would like to remember this assignment and have my students attempt to remediate a piece of their writing and then reflect on the challenges and successes that were a result of working in a different medium.