A Philosophy of Teaching

In our doctoral pedagogy course, we are asked to write a teaching philosophy, a document of varied importance as one goes about looking for professor-type jobs in academia. As a professional artifact, my limited encounters with similar documents as a consumer have been disillusioning (read: the philosophy and the practice are rarely in sync). As a personal exercise, though, constructing and iterating a philosophy statement is a valuable form of reflection.

For some reason, this assignment proved more difficult than anticipated. Articulating a foundation of practice for something in which I have little experience is not an easy matter. I want to invoke the name of Alfie Kohn but realized how little comparative research I have conducted to justify doing so. I want to rail on the current state of education in America but question its relevance to my philosophy even as I recognize its influence. I enjoy writing and crafting words, but for this first step I decided to cut to the chase. Rather than worry about the weeds and flowers in my sentence structure, I just wrote from the heart. The flowers, substance and marketing will have to wait for a later iteration.

A classroom is not a stage where teachers perform to a captive audience. It is not a factory floor where the foreman monitors the assembly line of knowledge. A classroom is a conversation, moderated by an experienced leader capable of empowering people to ask and answer questions.

As a teacher, I want to create an environment in which such conversations can occur. My role is one of an organizer and a mentor. The structure of each class and the semester as a whole provides the space in which discussion thrives, balancing the need to advance thought and produce tangible outcomes with the inertial forces that stifle student engagement. I want to be able to critique in a respectful manner while remaining an empathic listener that values student contributions to the flow of the course as well as the material being covered.

Students drive the conversation through their questions, insights and experiences. Learning takes place when a person successfully maps the external world to an internal taxonomy, so it is important that they interact with that world by expressing their process of meaning-making. This is accomplished by emphasizing communication and paired learning opportunities, where small groups of students work with new material and share their thoughts on a topic.

The student-teacher relationship is one best conceived as a shared learning experience. With in-class activities, the teacher serves as a guide, bringing the student along a path of discovery that is bounded by what the teacher’s knowledge. There is a specific direction and a clear goal in mind, but the student is free to meander along the way. With longer-term projects, the teacher participates in parallel as a way of exposing her own process and opening up those ideas for critique. The student serves a mentoring role, as well, through that critique, by engaging others in the class in dialogue, and in contributing her own unique experience to the conversation.

I don’t believe grading is the best way to invigorate learning. While there is some motivating benefit to structured deadlines for assignments, attaching a grade to the artifacts of learning is a poor means of inspiring learning. Grades inspire completion, whereas learning is a process that includes error and non-linear journeys. The absence of grades puts a greater emphasis on activities and exploration, allowing the intrinsic appeal of a topic to thrive without the dominant extrinsic objective to get a better evaluation. Grades also serve as a sorting mechanism, which artificially divides a class into successes and failures without allowing for the strengths and weaknesses each individual brings to the learning conversation.

Evaluation is a group learning process. It is an opportunity to learn not only to give critique but to accept it as well. It is an empowering activity that builds confidence in problem solving and helps develop adaptive learners. A major element of my courses will be peer teaching, where students are encouraged to learn a new topic and process it sufficiently to be able to communicate the key concepts to others. Assignments and projects are self-selected into a smaller portfolio submission, which is discussed by the class and made available for public critique. Reflections journals and communal blogging are tools of choice to document process throughout the semester, culminating in a personal summary essay that is not shared. By emphasizing the multi-faceted journey and not presenting learning as a to-do list, students emerge more confident.

Service-learning is also a key part of my classroom experience. Informatics activities lend themselves to partnerships with local community businesses and organizations. Grounded project work introduces real-world constraints and needs to the learning environment, allowing more abstract concepts to become the framework for practice and not the practice itself. Service-learning also reinforces a sense of greater community in students, encouraging them to become aware and involved in the world around them.

Notably absent in this draft is any discussion of my own experiences. I have served as a co-instructor of three human-computer interaction design courses—two at the graduate level, and one core undergraduate course—and as the associate instructor of a required Introduction to Informatics graduate course. Although I was granted a substantial voice in the three HCI courses by instructor of record Eli Blevis, the foundational design of the course was inherited.

I believe the handful of activities that were expressly my own received some positive response, but that is not the same as applying the above principles to a semester-long course. Much of the value of grade-free coursework is not necessarily seen at the end of 18 weeks, either. The emphasis on process rather than outcome and the culture of critique helps to create students with the confidence to engage with each other and their work in an impactful manner. I think that is particularly true with the current crop of second-year master’s students, but the only claim I can really make about what the HCI/d II course did for them is that it clearly didn’t stifle their voices. Only time will tell if the methodology is a factor, of if the School of Informatics just got lucky in their 2006 graduate recruiting.