Teaching Philosophy

Chris Roberts

Purdue University

 

Teaching Philosophy

Integrating technology into the classroom, immediate feedback, openness.

 

My favorite teachers always asked us questions, always asked us to respond, and always valued my opinion.  This is the same philosophy that I carry out in my classrooms, but I have chosen to enhance that ability through technology.  The working world views technology as a tool to boost productivity; I view it as a tool to boost comprehension and open communication in the classroom.  As an educator, I have adopted Marc Prensky’s notion of the “digital native” and the “digital immigrant.”  This paradigm assumes that today’s generation of young learners are immersed in the technologies of the day, including instant messenger, cell phones, ipods, podcasts, web-surfing, and hyper-text.  Prensky further argues that the traditional classroom environment of lecture/note-taking is so foreign to the digital native’s natural environment that it impedes their learning. 

As an educator, I attempt to engage students using new media.  However, when I first came to Purdue and began integrating these ideas, I realized that not every student is as immersed in technology as Prensky would claim.  As I began to roll out the use of classroom blogs and instructing students how to hyperlink documents to their own webpage, I found that some of them did not grasp the information easily.  These early problems reflect why other new media scholars have criticized the use of technology in the classroom and questioned issues of access (Blackmon, 2007; Selfe 1999).  As an educator, I believe it is important to use these technologies (as to prepare our students for the workforce) but it is just as important to ensure that each student has equal access to these resources and is well prepared to use them in order to engage the class.  To that end, I believe new media technology makes the classroom more interesting and more open, but must be tempered with patience and thorough explanation.  This includes that the instructor knows different file formats (MACS vs PC’s) and can offer troubleshooting options so that students can access information. 

While I still employ traditional methods such as lecture during class, I use technology at every opportunity to illustrate lectures, provide feedback, and encourage class participation.  In my Rhetoric of the Western World class, I created a class blog for student interaction.  The blog has become a huge success as students soon realized that it was not merely an assignment, but that it became a resource for them to learn.  Soon, students began not just responding to the readings we had in class, they were researching and posting images of the ancient Sophists and Socratics, maps of the ancient world, and even responding to articles published in the paper using the rhetorical theories we read about in class.

             While I believe new media offers an exciting way to engage students, students will not engage the material if the atmosphere is not an open and accepting environment.  As an educator, I attempt to make everyone’s ideas heard.  We have probably all experienced a student with a differing or minority opinion from the rest of the class, but it is just as important that the student is allowed to voice his or her opinion without fear of retribution.  I believe that it is vital to our democracy that minority positions (whether liberal or conservative) are heard and practiced in the classroom; it is practice for the student to construct an oral argument and asses its strengths and flaws.  Classroom humor should be carefully tempered, as teasing is inherently aggressive and tends to lead to hostile class environments.  I tend to guide open discussions as long as students know that they must respect each other. 

Because I teach a rhetoric class, I tend to pull many examples from current events and many of these events are inherently political.  Fortunately, there are plenty of examples on both side of the political spectrum to pull examples.  This is especially true if we are discussing presidential rhetoric which usually has a political/deliberative role.  I focus more on the type of arguments that are being structured, and why the speaker is choosing a particular posture for his/her argument.  Using this approach keeps the class engaged in current events and does not threaten their personal values.  An educator teaches and the message is always lost if students feel like they are in a hostile environment. 

Integrating technology into the classroom, immediate feedback, openness.

Chris Roberts

 

Doctoral Candidate

Rhetoric and Organizational Communication