MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

The three main objectives of my teaching methods are: 1) To foster critical thinking and inspire
an appreciation for analysis 2) To promote mastery of course content and course objectives 3)
To encourage the application of course contents and critical thinking to their respective majors
and ultimately their lives.
In order for anyone to be a successful instructor they must learn to be attentive to student
learning and adapt ones teaching methods and strategies to the specific necessities of the
students. I believe teaching is as much a learning process for the instructor as it is for the student.
It should always be a give and receive type of relationship; I can learn from my students and
they can learn from me.
It is a unfortunate reality that at times students are dehumanized to the extent of being seen as
just another number to their instructors. As someone who at some point in her life has
unfortunately been recipient of that standardized method of teaching, I know the destructive
effects it can have on the interest, creativity, and intellectual development of the student. To
avoid this, it is of paramount importance to treat the students as the valuable individuals they are
and make sure that they know that your classroom is a safe space in which respectful and
creative dialogue is encouraged.
In the classroom, the practice of this style of pedagogy becomes a bit problematic as instructors
often encounter students that do not like to voice their perspectives as they have been taught for
years to only validate the opinion of the instructor and to belittle their own. In these occasions, it
is the job of the instructor to assure the student of the important contribution their perspectives
bring to the classroom.
When discussing a new literary movement in class, I believe it is of great importance to provide
the class with the historical, political, social, and at times, even psychological context of the
literature being observed. It is vital for an instructor of literature to find a way to relate the texts
to our society so the student may feel less detached from the subject matter. On many occasions
during my education, I found myself in different classes thinking about what real world utility
did anything I was being taught had, and albeit this served as great motivation to become the
right kind of educator I always dreamed of having, it did make some of my earliest
experiences in the classroom quite dull and less fruitful than they should have been. Because of
those experiences, Ive made sure that part of my teaching philosophy will integrate the
discussion of why the literature being analyzed is of contemporary relevance.
An integral part of my teaching method is that of including film and media into the classroom.
Literature by itself is wondrous, but in the era of technology it is important to include other
mediums to which the students can make comparisons to. The integration of media in the
classroom can encourage students to begin to analyze film and music as if they were literature by
dissecting literary structures such as setting, plot, themes, tone, etc., within films/songs. This, of
course, should not be the main objective of a literature course, the texts still need to be read, but
the integration of media serves more as secondary tool to further promote critical thinking and
insightful analysis.
The most important thing I wish to impart on my students is the restorative power of literature.
Human beings are natural-born storytellers; its the way we have always communicated our
thoughts on the world around us. We live and breathe stories and because of this literature has
the unique power to heal people when nothing else has. I want my students to be able to read a
work of fiction and witness the paradoxical beauty of finding a personal truth. I need for my
students to know that they are not alone, that their anxieties, their preoccupations, their emotions,
have been felt by people from different eras, ethnicities, nationalities, and that this is a beautiful
thingIt means, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said: our thoughts are universal, [we] are not
lonely or isolated from anyone [we] belong.