Teaching Portfolio

Teaching Statement

Literature is a personal activity. Literature is a public activity. Because who we are is a mixture of how we have been constructed by external factors, we each share common and unique approaches to life. Literature helps us empathize and imagine; literature provides a common language that helps in our human endeavors. Literature provides lessons about life and living that are personal to us all, yet also very public. I teach literature because it helps us live our lives, both individually and as a community.

In an oration given to the students of the Royal Academy of Naples in 1732, Professor of Rhetoric and humanist Giambattista Vico challenges his students to cultivate a “heroic mind”:

Do not breed within you any indolent wishes of learning dropping down from heaven into your bosoms while you slumber. Stir yourselves up with a productive desire for wisdom. By your increasing and undaunted labors, make trial of what you can do, put to the test how much you are capable of. Ply your gifts and energies in all possible directions. Stir your minds up, enkindle that the divinity that fills you. If you take this course of action (poets came to it by nature, as it happens) you too will engender God-inspired marvels of your own, and surprise yourselves in the doing of it.

Vico’s call for an education in liberal arts illustrates the ideology of the Renaissance Humanists who advocated a communal spirit based on the fostering of individual achievement and what that achievement brings to the community. Since Vico’s oration, humanismís popularity has been attacked by many theorists who denounce it as a philosophy based on oppression founded by the white, middle-class, western, heterosexual male. I believe that within humanism there is still a valid approach for the fostering of heroic minds in an age of fragmentation, disbelief, and individualism that can encompass difference as a strength and not privilege any race, sex, or class.

Innovation

During his last State of the Union address, President Clinton once again stressed the need for a computer in every classroom. While I choose to teach with computers, I, seemingly unlike many of our politicians, realize that they are not a panacea for our teaching woes: the teachers that have access to computers must not only have a prodigious operational prowess, but must have the vision and critical capacities to employ that technology successfully. Just having computers in a classroom is not intrinsically good, but the teachers must be trained to use them to enhance the quality of education. I advocate and utilize computers in my teaching for two reasons: (1) computer use allows hands-on critique of how microprocessing technology affects our lives; and (2) computers facilitate additional approaches to learning that help the individual excel in his/her studies while providing a forum for diverse interactions. Technology has been denounced — and continues to be — by many in the humanities as impersonal and deleterious to the humanities themselves, to those who practice the humanities, and to the future of liberal arts. While these fears are not easily assuaged, using a humanist approach to technology in education and being familiar with how that technology operates allows us to approach the ever-increasing cyberworld, not with fear, but with care. As our society’s technical innovations continue to grow, so must our awareness of them in order to avoid any distopian futures predicted by many of my colleagues.

Challenge

Technology, in itself, offers a challenge in the classroom — not only to the instructor, but to the students. Challenges undertaken, though demanding and difficult, offer the death to thoughtless complacency and habit. This process often causes students to investigate positions they have held in life without examination. Literature examines positions of class, race, gender, sexuality, religion because these constructions make us who we are, yet also inhibit our growth if not engaged critically. My job as a teacher is to challenge traditional social positions, not necessarily in an effort to overthrow, but to help foster within students a skepticism that does not just accept, but asks questions, engages in dialectic, and thinks aloud. My goal is to offer my students a challenge which compels them to reevaluate their positions as humans critically and thoughtfully without turning them off to the new and different. I believe that only through challenge, innovation, and care is a teacher ultimately successful.