Philosophy of Experience

I suppose this might be because my teaching is completely indefinable without the input of my students, who are in many cases responsible for creating knowledge and molding the class. Dewey tells us in his "Philosophy of Experience" that education is a process of growth and of building on previous experiences in order to create new meaning, a concept that is as relevant today in our standards-driven educational environment as it was in the early 20th century. Dewey calls on teachers to foresee where students' experiences are headed; it is the teacher's duty to look both into the past, or students' previous experiences, and into the future, or where those experiences will take them. In both secondary and college settings I find that my students' learning is perpetually mediated and defined by their past experiences, and this informs my teaching on a daily basis. Assignments call on students to use personal anecdotes in order to ground themselves in their topics, or to consider their own identities, their audiences, and their places within their writing. Projects and papers require students to tie their ideas to both smaller communities and larger societies. Learning cannot happen in a vaccuum; students need to create understanding based on previous experiences in order to transfer concepts later in their academic and personal lives.

The Importance of Place

In the upper left corner of my portfolio, I have included an image of a storm rolling in over a Midwestern cornfield. It reminds me of the grass between my toes on my grandmother's property in central Illinois. It took leaving this place for me to understand how much of my identity was rooted in its soil, which has led me to consider the importance of place in my instruction -- something that I think we lose sight of in a modern society that becomes smaller every day due to technological advances. My students' experiences, as mentioned earlier, mold their learning; their experiences, in turn, are molded by the places they call home. Thus, their learning must be similarly rooted in place. George Lopez articulates the importance of a "sense of place" and a "sense of community;" these things are "indespensable to a state of well-being, an individual's and a country's." I base many of my assignments and approaches on this reality; local culture and community is an integral element of my instruction. This manifests itself in different ways depending on the group of students; for my middle school students, this typically takes the form of community research -- interviews, local history examinations, and personal narratives, all of which explore the stories and environments that have shaped their lives. In the college classroom, this becomes research based on smaller communities within larger ones; for example, a group might choose to research music piracy on Purdue's campus and analyze the characteristics of that small community in order to more thoroughly understand the society at large. In either instance, students use their surroundings to construct an identity upon which they can build in later discussions and assignments.

New Media in the Interactive Classroom

Technology and I did not get along very well until my third year of college. I had no idea what a motherboard was, how all of that stuff got onto the Internet, or why I had to learn how to do things like operate an LCD projector. Today, I cannot imagine my teaching without the creative possibilities technology allows. However, I go about multimedia incorporation with a keen eye turned to my objectives; as Gardner reminds us, all students learn differently and possess different capabilities to lead them to the finish line. Richard Mayer and other educational theorists agree that educational technology must keep this in mind. Use of modern technology in the classroom, from overhead projectors to Active Boards, can be either supplemental or detrimental depending upon how it is used. Used correctly, student-centered new media in the classroom can motivate students to test the boundaries of composition, which encourages them to try new things like produce and edit movies, analyze gaming enviroments, or develop web sites. Students recognize these skills as not only relevant to their own experiences, but also potentially important to their future careers, which pushes them to challenge themselves further. While some schools, including some at which I have taught, lack the resources to invest in some modern technologies, I do my best to incorporate as much multimedia instruction and integration as possible in my own teaching.

It is difficult to define who I am as a teacher; it is as though I am attempting to look at myself from outside the protective bubble of my comfortable classroom and pinpoint the things that make the gears in my head turn when one of my students comments on a novel or asks a question about her writing. However, it is not hard for me to define my overall goal at any given moment on any given day; I want my students to relate the larger world, the society they enter when they walk out my door, to the smaller microcosms of the school, my classroom, or themselves. I want them to first understand who they are, where they come from, and how that community defines them, and then I want them to take that knowledge and use it to relate to our technologically-driven, fast-paced society. My goal is to help them see and make sense of a "bigger picture," but only through the lens of a smaller snapshot.