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Statement of Teaching Philosophy,

Experience, and Approach
By Theodora Johnson
*Note: I wrote the first part of this paper in 1989 when I initially thought about enrolling in
school at UALR. At the time I was teaching Comp I at a junior college that was a cross between an Adult
Education and Welfare-to-Work Program. Most of my students were either displaced auto workers or
women wanting to get skills to get in the workplace. It chronicles my earlier teaching philosophy I
included it in this paper because I wanted to show the stages of how my philosophy has been affected by
my experience and by my studies in Language Theory, the Little Rock Writing Project, and most recently
by the readings from Cross Talk in Comp Theory (Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola) while studying
Composition Theory

I cant write!
I hear these words moaned, cried, and shrieked by freshman writers after they are issued their first
writing assignments. I simply nod, smile, and reply, Yes, you can and will. It is not that hard at all. And
of course, they write. Getting the students to that point is not that easily cut and dried though. There are
many factors that determine whether a freshman will pass or fail English I, but two factors stand above
the rest. The first is that they learn to effectively write, edit, and rewrite.
After four years of teaching in an institution whose mission was to educate the
uneducable, I developed a whole new philosophy and approach to teaching English Composition.
They are respectively that anyone can write once introduced to a structured method and
guidance; and that this method can be taught through the use of unorthodox methods to reach a
non-traditional student.
I had taught traditional grammar and literature on the secondary level using the
traditional method, and thought, at the time, that there was only one way to teachby the book,
period, and that was the way I did it. However, once I began teaching at Jordan College, I had to
look at the education process in a different light. Here I was trying to teach non-traditional
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students in a traditional way and failing to reach them. These non-traditional students could not
identify a complete sentence, nor could many of them identify a subject or a verb in a sentence;
so, when I walked in talking about thesis statements, comma splices, fragments, parallelism,
vagueness, and consistency, they tuned out immediately.
Nevertheless, I did find a way to tune them in to writing. I decided to incorporate basic
structure and theory with an unorthodox approach. It worked. By breaking the terminology down
to their levels and reaching them by using concepts they could grasp, I started getting the results
I desired. The students could now understand what I wanted, which was well-structured themes
based on sound thesis statements, and thats what I got from them. I also took a stance on making
the course fun. If English is presented as something fun rather than drudgery or as just a
necessary credit, then the students will view the class with a more positive attitude. A more
positive attitude toward the course produced more positive results in the students writing.
I believe that by allowing students to start writing in a non-threatening environment will
free them to write more productively. For instance, by allowing students to write persuasive
essays based on classroom discussions of current events, or to write a comparison-contrast essay
on two movie characters viewed in an in-class movie, or write a descriptive essay based on a
favorite place allowed them to explore the avenue of expression writing. Sometimes I would
even let them interview one another and write stories about one another to present to the class.
All of these papers evolved into longer, more developed themes and essays, but to take the
edginess out of the writing assignment, I allowed the students to write freely on the front end.
After completing the drafts, I and the students would edit and tighten the writing according to the
rules of proper Composition I writing These types of writing assignments gave them a new look
at writing as something pleasant rather than required drudgery.
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I believe that these approaches, combined with my philosophy for teaching writing at the
time, is responsible for the successes I had with my freshmen writers. Many went on to four-year
schools and graduated; others went to work in white-collar jobs; some dropped out because of
government red tape interfering with their financial aid. Regardless of their outcomes while I
was there, the majority of them expressed their thanks for my helping them progress in their
writing.
Twenty years later, my philosophy had not changed. Although I went from teaching
college freshmen to high school freshmen, I believed in the same approach of making writing fun
as opposed to drudgery. Although when I started teaching high school I tended to use the old
methods of brainstorm-draft-revise-rewrite-produce as the means to teach the children to write,
and I received several successes during that time, I found that I needed to change my approach to
get better drafts from all students instead of just the ones who got it. I had to shift my
philosophy and my approach to teaching students how to write. Instead of using the old
approach, I started using a book called The Lively Art of Writing by Lucille Vaughn Payne to
introduce students to writing. Through the guidance of the text, the students learned to employ
the idea that all writing is a means of alerting the audience to hear Hey, I want to tell you
something! and that is the approach we would start with as we wrote the initial drafts for our
papers. The text taught that writing has a rhythmthat sentences needed to vary in length as in
vocal languageshort sentences, medium sentences, long sentences so as we would revise, we
revised according to that theory. There were also low-stakes writing scenarios that students
could take part in that were non-threatening because the work was based solely on student
imagination, but it allowed them to learn how to strengthen their writing with more vivid details.
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The results were amazing. I saw a complete turnaround in the students approach to and
production of paragraph and essay writing. The papers had rhythm, details, coherence, and style!
Now, as a student again and a budding rhetorician, my philosophy had changed again.
After being introduced to the fundamentals and theory of rhetoric on all levelscomposition,
language, rhetoric, and technicalI see teaching writing in a completely different way. Now I
look at writing through the ethos, pathos, and logos of the matter. I now use pedagogical theory
learned in this Composition Theory class as the baseline of how to approach writing assignments
when I have the opportunity to teach them now.
Much of the change in my approach is based on the teachings of respected rhetoricians in
the text such as Elbow, Shaunessey, Emig, Murray, and Ong. I had previously studied some
theory in the Because Writing Matters series as a fellow in the Little Rock Writing Project that
started the shift in my pedagogical stance toward writing, but the studies in Composition Theory
solidified the shift. One particular writer confirms a belief born out of the shift in my writing
philosophy. I agree with much of what Emig has to say about writing and learning. I have always
believed that if a student can write about what he or she has read or studied, he or she can show
that they understand the content. I currently work with students to show them how to write
summaries about what they read whether it be a piece from a magazine article or a chapter in
their science or history book. Once they capture the essence of the reading and put it into words,
they find that they have a better understanding of what they have read or studied. In fact, for the
last five years when I taught remediation classes for low-level readers, I had the classes to write
summaries and reflections after reading the non-fiction passages in the reader or by producing a
workshop-model presentation of the reading where students could use pictures as well as text to
demonstrate their understanding. As a result of this system, several of the students increased
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their reading levels up to three grade levels. In that, I see what Jerome Bruner means in his posit
of three major ways in which we represent and deal with actuality:
Enactivewe learn by doing
Iconicwe learn by depiction in an image
Representational or symbolicwe learn by restatement in words (Villanueva 10).
The readings from the Comp Theory class have served to broaden my philosophy and my
approach to teaching writing. The theories presented by writers such as Shaunessey, Emig, and
Murray have made the biggest impact on me. Because of their teachings, I can teach writing with
broader insights and usher my students into the realm of writing in a kinder, gentler way. Rather
than micro-managing the writing process as I did in the past, rather than standing over the
students papers as the editing monster ready to mark awk and frag in red ink on the drafts,
and rather than treating writing as a chore, I can now teach writing with a broader knowledge
base and fidelity.