Derek Ettensohn!

Statement of Teaching Philosophy Statement of Teaching Philosophy

An inexhaustible sense of possibility drew me in every other week, cashed paycheck in hand. The promise of a passage out of one world and into another drove me to explore the shelves at the local bookstore, piling up my trove at the checkout counter. As a high school student, literature was an encounter with a novel realm of ideas that challenged my view of the world, constantly forcing me to redraw and reimagine my conceptual map. This experience of literature as a productive, formative journey now guides my teaching of literature and composition. While cultivating an appreciation for the complex thinking that critical reading and writing promote, I further prepare my students for the challenges of an increasingly globalized world through the content of my courses. As a teacher whose research focuses transnational, postcolonial, and global literature, I introduce students not only to regions of the worlds that they may be unfamiliar with, but also to new forms of thinking. My courses raise complex issues surrounding social justice and responsibility that challenge students to evaluate their assumptions, expand their perspectives, and respect the diversity of human experience. The ethical reasoning and value of global social justice that I promote in my classes begins with an emphasis on close reading. In all my classes I stress the development of analytic skills by modeling a patient, careful approach to texts. While I wish to convey the pleasure of literature, I also want to demonstrate to students how this pleasure is magnied by a close engagement with texts of all kinds. I lead close reading workshops for classes that demystify the process using texts ranging from Lady Gaga performances to Shakespeare. These workshops at the beginning of the semester are reinforced by a series of 1-page response papers to selected passages in the rst month of a semester, leading up to a formal, close reading assignment. In world literature and postcolonial courses I have students collectively develop a chrestomathy online. This exercise, based on Amitav Ghoshs model in the Ibis Trilogy, reveals the layered history of objects and words. The attention to the detail that this activity demands develops close reading skills, while further highlighting the links between language, history, and culture that reinforces literatures relationship with disciplines as wide ranging as sociology, anthropology, politics, science, and popular culture. Through these methods my courses evaluate how literature interacts with other disciplines, while also critically considering its difference. I view my classes as modeling an interaction with the text, rather than as sessions intended to disseminate information. This atmosphere encourages intellectual curiosity, though at times it generates unexpected turns in class discussion. At times I have been able to anticipate student responses, such as their distaste for the aggressive tone of Jamaica Kincaids narrator in Lucy. I use their reactions as an opportunity to reect on why Kincaid forms her character in such a way and how our responses as readers implicate us in larger historical processes. At other times, I have been surprised by student responses, such as when a class was determined to read Derek Walcotts A Far Cry From Africa exclusively in terms of the violence of colonial exploitation. They desired to t the poem into a familiar narrative of colonial violation. Though this reading was in many ways correct, it was also limiting. By turning to allusions and language of the poem, I sought to have the students complicated their own analysis in order to demonstrate the richness of the text that is lost if we too quickly t the poem into a comfortable analytical framework.

Derek Ettensohn!

Statement of Teaching Philosophy

At a larger scale, I engage students with the broader questions and problems that motivate the study of literature. For example, I begin world literature courses with earnest questioning of the problems that arise from the very terms delimiting the eld. Students are asked to ll out an entry ticket dening what these terms mean for them, uncovering the multitude of potential denitions that can be both liberating and overwhelming. Students revisit these entry tickets at the end of the semester in the form of exit tickets, a reective exercise that emphasizes the scope of the material covered during the semesterthe variety of literary worlds visited and their own learning processes. Finally, at the conclusion of the course the class will put their knowledge of literature into practice, running a conference to select a prize for world literature that requires students to consider what factors allow literature to be prized, translated, and passed on for generations: Is it formal innovation? The cultural relevance or insight of the content? Critical consensus, canonical status, or marketing? In the process of presenting and evaluating the nominations of their peers, the class confronts larger issues of literary reception while sharing insight into the particular oeuvre of their chosen authors. I maintain high expectations for both my students and myself. I have sought to improve my own teaching by engaging in a reective teaching style, constantly evaluating student feedback in the form of midterm evaluations, class performance, and student engagement to measure the efcacy of my teaching. These strategies allow me to recognize and work to accommodate diverse learning styles and various levels of academic preparation in students. My course evaluations consistently note my dedication to students, emphasizing my enthusiasm, patience, and availability, as well as commenting on the detail and precision with which I lead class discussions and the diversity of viewpoints my classes presented. I have beneted from excellent mentors and believe strongly in providing guidance for students in and out of the classroom. I was recently recognized by the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority for my outstanding mentorship and leadership as a member of the Brown Community. I thoroughly enjoy teaching and look forward to continuing my journey while inspiring students to embark on their own adventure of lifelong learning.