Croxall
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
By the end of the current academic year, I will have five years’ experience teaching literatureand writing at the college level. I have designed and taught classes on basic composition, worldliterature, literary analysis, print and digital poetry, and, for Spring 2010, contemporaryAmerican literature and the second half of the English major’s survey of American literature.The tools and approaches that I have developed for this range of courses have been shaped bymy two primary pedagogical goals: first, to help my students see that interpreting literature issomething they can do and, second, to assist them in developing their ability to reason andcommunicate through writing.The readings that I assign my students are challenging, but the time spent closely reading thesetexts in class provides the students with the skills they need to read effectively and analyticallyon an individual basis. For example, in my recent class, “Introduction to Media Theory andMedia Fiction,” working slowly through the indeterminacies of Pynchon’s
The Crying of Lot 49
prepared the students to be excellent readers of Stuart Moulthrop’s chronologically-complexhypertext novel
Victory Garden
. This course not only asked students to read complicated primary texts but also to connect their themes to important concepts in media studies. As thestudents encountered essays by McLuhan, Baudrillard, or Virilio, they wrote one-pagesummaries of each article to prepare for class. In class, the students collectively drewconnections between specific essays (say, Derrida’s “The Book to Come”) and specific texts(Jeanette Winterson’s
The.PowerBook
) and recorded them using the course wiki. This activitytaught the students both that they
had
the ability to extract meaningful information fromtheoretical texts via careful reading and
how
interpretation can proceed from those details.My students’ ability to analyze themes within individual works as well as connections amongmultiple texts also improves when they become acquainted with appropriate historical andcultural contexts. This context becomes especially important in a large survey course such as thiscoming spring’s “American Literature Survey II.” Students in the course will each be assignedtwo years in this time period and asked to identify eight events of particular political, scientific,or artistic significance in each year. They will then collaboratively build an interactive anddynamic timeline using resources I developed as a Fellow in Emory’s Center for InteractiveTeaching. The result was be a class-produced reference tool that provides a backdrop for our consideration of realism, modernism, and postmodernism.In helping my students apply this context to interpreting literature, I find it useful to devote asignificant portion of class time to directed discussion. When students have the opportunity tospeak freely about what they have read—either as a whole class or in small groups—they makenew connections about the novel or poem. With the goal of helping students internalize the ideasthey develop in discussion, I have experimented with exercises that connect discursive and physical learning pathways. For example, after my recent class on American war literature readmost of Whitman’s Civil War poems, I asked each student to decide whether or not Whitmansupported the war. They then sat on opposing sides of the room based on their decision andengaged in a debate. As the students searched the poems for evidence to support their viewpoints, they discovered that they could read the poems well enough to develop a claim usingthe content and form of the text. As students began presenting these arguments to one another, I
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