teaching philosophy: enabling power

My teaching philosophy is simple. I am an enabler. No one can "empower" someone else; that someone has to find it in themselves to empower themselves. But what I like to teach is a path towards that personal empowerment through literature, cultural and popular media studies, and even traditional literary philosophy. When students read authors they have never encountered in more mainstream literature courses whose concerns and lives match their own, and learn to discuss those texts and issues within a classroom setting, their eyes light up and they are often awakened to a path in their own lives to personal power.

I have had, in the course of my own life, some amazing teachers. I try, very hard, to be that teacher for my students. That teacher who challenges them without making them feel inadequate, that teacher who connects literature to their lives in a way that makes them keep coming back to it. That teacher who understands that they may not, themselves, have ever really thought about the issues we address in class: race, gender, class, and how all literary texts talk to one another through a kind of palimpsest of intertextuality.

I love it the most when a student in turn challenges me. A student comes up with the exact thing I want to discuss, but in a new way. I also love to use technology in the classroom: visuals, hypertext, movie clips, youtube, audio of authors reading their own work, power point presentations that combine all these elements. Combining traditional narratives with new ones- like using popular rock songs to connect to, say, Robert Frost and thus exploring themes of isolation versus protection in literature. I like to teach close-reading, even to students who normally would not be exposed to such a concept (non-majors), and I do this with the biographical approach they are so used to with authors they may or may not have heard of- like a lecture on Sarah Orne Jewett and Emily Dickinson.

Books are dangerous. They are a path to power, and I hope to put that power into each and every student's hands.