Teaching Philosophies Statement
Teaching for Adaptive Transfer
My goal as a teacher is to help students understand how learning inside the classroom can be connected to their past experiences and future careers. To that end, my teaching practices are grounded in the concept of “adaptive transfer,” which emphasizes the process of reshaping knowledge in negotiating new and unfamiliar writing situations (DePalma & Ringer, 2011). Teaching for adaptive transfer requires the teacher to position students as resourceful agents who participate in a variety of literacy activities and possess a range of knowledge bases. For example, a proposal writing project in my first-year composition course invites students to build on their disciplinary knowledge and present their arguments to the general public. Motivated by his passion for space exploration, one student created a blog investigating how NASA missions could contribute to the development on Earth in a more sustainable way. Another student transformed her love for the sci-fi series Westworld into a comprehensive report, in which she argued that the development of Artificial Intelligence technology needs to draw on feminism to reduce gender bias in representation. In completing this writing project, students learn to develop their personal interests into scholarly inquiry, push the boundary of existing knowledge, and cultivate a sense of rhetorical flexibility. More importantly, students document their writing processes in the weekly writer’s log, in which they justify how decision-making is informed by their new and existing knowledge. Through frequent reflections, students grow their metacognitive awareness about themselves as writers and about the writing process, which lays a solid foundation for the effective transfer of knowledge and skills across contexts.
Writing as a Social Practice
The second pillar supporting my pedagogy is the understanding that writing is a social practice involving changing conventions. It is important that students understand how writing is essentially shaped by the dynamic interaction among social expectations, discourse conventions, and personal aspirations. In my first-year composition courses, I draw on insights from digital literacy and multimodal composition to foreground how writing in today’s world is often mediated by digital media and how the orchestration of various semiotic resources affords new ways of meaning-making. In highlighting the multimodal nature of writing, I aim at helping students grow a sense of agency and rhetorical awareness, with which they can better navigate the changing communicative landscape. For example, when introducing my first-year students to the concept of “academic writing,” I guide them through the exploration of the emerging, multimodal genres that are created for academic audiences, such as web-based articles in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy and the video abstracts in the Journal of Visualized Experiments, and engage them in the discussion of how these genres differ from the traditional ones in terms of presenting and dissimilating information. Such activities challenge students to reexamine the stereotypical view of academic writing as rigidly structured “five-paragraph essays” and encourage them to analyze how writing can be innovated to better fulfill the rhetorical purposes and serve the target audiences.
Bringing the multimodal perspective into academic writing, however, by no means intends to dismiss the importance of written language. In fact, I have observed that the novel task environment of a multimodal assignment creates a favorable space for students to negotiate the use of language at lexical, syntactic, and discoursal levels. This observation was made among my first-year multilingual students who completed a video project designed under Jody Shipka’s (2005) multimodal task-based framework. One student, who is bilingual in Arabic and English, wrote in the post-project reflection that he had to think about which word choices and rhetorical structures could enhance the persuasiveness of his argument, thus making him “sound like a politician” in the video. It is through such negotiation that students learn to become critical and empowered members of any discourse community.
Equity-Focused Teaching Leverages Diversity
Over the years, I have worked with students coming from a wide range of social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, and I come to realize that it is not enough to merely acknowledge the differences. Thus, I critically engage in learner differences through the lens of equity-focused teaching and actively leverage student diversity as a valuable asset for learning. One of the writing assignments in my first-year composition course invites students to explore how identity is shaped, constructed, and represented through language and literacy practices. In this assignment, students’ unique identities and their sense of belonging to different racial, cultural, and professional groups become valuable sources of creativity and motivation. Another way of leveraging student diversity is to accommodate different learning styles. I make the course content more accessible by presenting the learning materials in a variety of modalities (readings, videos, mini-lectures, and posters) and providing different options for submitting assignments.
As a Chinese-English bilingual speaker myself, I have experienced firsthand the anxiety of trying to conform to the “standards” in English and the frustration of speaking with a foreign accent. Thus, when working with my multilingual students, I carefully examine whether the institutional norms and instructional discourses are based on hidden assumptions and unequal power structures that might pose an additional barrier to learning. My scrutiny is best demonstrated in my approach to teaching academic citation. Instead of asking students to memorize the mechanics of citation styles, I explain to them the rationales behind the system of academic attribution and engage them in the critical examination of the citing practices across languages. Bearing in mind that the word “plagiarism” carries with it an ideological positioning built on the Western concept of authorship (Pennycook, 1994), I take caution in labeling a textual borrowing behavior as such, and I always give students a chance to voice their concerns and confusions. Such communications could help students better understand the concept and foster a sense of academic belonging.