Teaching Philosophy

Angela J. Kennedy My teaching philosophy stems from the idea that we read everything, regardless of whether its printed on a page or cached into a webpage. For example, when reading a picture book, the written text has meaning, the visual text has meaning, and we find a third meaning that is created by the combination of the multiple texts of a narrative. Learning that every part of a text has a meaning and relevance to the whole, has made a major impact on how I teach my classes. Keeping this in mind, I have established a teaching pedagogy that gives students the opportunity to analyze the details that create a text so that student will feel confident in reading a text and be able to logically analyze any text for the task at hand. In my first year composition classes, I provide students with a variety of textual examples that require them to rhetorically question how they read and identify an argument. I believe that when students see a direct application to what they are learning, they are more likely to retain that information and apply it more broadly to their studies. In order to facilitate this for my students, early in the semester I ask them to choose a music video from which they are supposed to provide a reading of the song lyrics coupled with an analysis of music video that asks them to think about the implications of the video. When showing an example to my students, I often choose a song that has been used in a movie in order to afford three types of clipsthe original video, a clip of the song used in the movie, and an example of how the song has been used in a fan video in order to investigate how the song is being used as a part of the written and visual aspects of the text. The implementation of digital technologies in my classroom not only allows students to work on familiar ground, but also expands their perception of how they view texts. The increase of digital content requires students to be more aware of what they are seeing and how they are reading what is placed in front of them. Composition classes give students the opportunity to write in a variety of ways and experiment with how writing is created and disseminated, with the end result of my classes being that they will be aware of how their words are more than thoughts on a page. In literature classes, I give students the chance to look at how others have placed their words onto the page. I like to approach my classes with the idea in mind that we work through and study the texts together, with the common goal of bringing greater understanding and appreciation to the particular text we are studying. Recognizing that students bring a variety of experiences and beliefs to the table, I believe that it is my responsibility to expose them to the canonical as well as unconventional literary texts that we find around us. Keeping this in mind, I incorporate digital media into my literature classes as there are a variety of text types that are being used to create what adolescent literature author Patrick Carman has labeled the future of storytelling. By creating this combination of texts, I am able to acknowledge what has already been written alongside what lies ahead in the future of literature. I see English classes more generally as sharing the same conceptual idea: the study and expansion of texts, and to that end, I ask my students to read extensively and respond comprehensively. Creating writing intensive literature classes requires my students to think about what they are reading and formulate critical thinking skills that will allow them to take their ideas and place them on the page. I believe that there is a strong connection between reading and

writingthat those who read are better writers. Having an understanding of what it takes to tie literature together is an important skill that assists writers with conceptual ideas of form and analysis as they are either incorporating those skills into their personal writing or integrating the ideas into academic analysis. Writing intensive classes also give students who may feel uncomfortable sharing their ideas with other classmates an opportunity to express themselves that they might not have had otherwise. Students often think that response papers in a literature class are simply to assess whether they have read the assigned readings, which is why I often move away from questions that ask for cursory details and requires them to think about other ways into reading a particular passage or thematic idea. I believe that literature reflects the truth of our own experience of being human and that we all do battle with the darkness that is inside and outside of us. Literature offers us great comfort because it tells us that we do not battle alone. When I study literary texts, I am reminded that in each piece there is an individualistic quality that unites them together and it is my responsibility to assist my students in making sense of what may seem to be insensible at first glance, making literature and writing more accessible and applicable to their lives than when they started.