My primary goal as a teacher of language and literature is to instill in my students a critical sense that is both fine-tuned and self-aware. I believe students should leave their formative years of higher education with new tools to help them analyze the information to which they are constantly exposed. I seek in my classes to provide the tools students can use to analyze language, texts, and the historical contexts which give birth to them. In addition, I encourage my students to apply the same set of analytical tools to themselves, fostering self-awareness and personal growth in the process. Here I will try to give some sense of my method for developing these critical tools and the philosophy of learning that underlies that method.

I believe the best way to introduce students to critical reading and thinking is through cultural phenomena about which they already think more or less critically. Music, movies, television, websites and similar media are already part of students’ regular critical conversations. Students are more than willing to encourage one another to see a given movie or buy a certain album, often with substantive evidence justifying their recommendation. The building blocks of academic argumentation are already present in most students’ everyday discussions. More importantly, students engage some texts critically without any external encouragement to do so. My role as a teacher is to foster this critical sense and help fine-tune it. Bringing objects of popular culture - and, more importantly, the accompanying heated discussions of their worth – into the classroom initiates students into a rudimentary form of critical inquiry. My role as an instructor is to direct this inquiry in fruitful directions by challenging the explanations students give for their positions until the class is forming substantive arguments for varying interpretations.

I encourage students to recognize that a single text can generate many varying interpretations. It is their responsibility to argue for a particular view. I give my students the opportunity to argue for their positions while developing their writing skills. Students in my courses are constantly writing and arguing, not just in the days or hours leading up to a major paper. I believe students best develop a critical sensibility by practicing it. It is only by constantly wrestling with interpretation and written argument that students can recognize their personal strengths as thinkers and writers, as well as those areas in which they need improvement.

This “learning by doing” model extends to the process of revision. Students wary of revision very often have not been taught how to systematically evaluate and improve their writing. I try to provide students with ample opportunity to revise their work as well as the work of others. I do not, however, encourage peer editing within the class. While I believe it to be a valuable tool, I have found peer editing rarely delves beneath surface mechanics. In order to give a fuller sense of the revision process, I have students practice revising on sample essays. By seeing where her revisions overlap with those of her classmates, an individual student gains some sense of the conventional rules of grammar, usage, punctuation and the like. More importantly, by seeing how different students re-envision a paper’s argument, individual students recognize the uniqueness of their own style of argumentation.

The diversity of revisions students offer for a common text reflects the distinct ways individuals relate to texts. Different interpretations are the result of different relationships between persons and between persons and texts. I encourage my students to think about why they relate to texts the ways they do. My hope is that students reflect on both the personal/psychological reasons for their interpretations as well as social/cultural reasons. Within the confines of the classroom I restrict discussion to the latter, encouraging students to evaluate texts (both “literary” and “popular”) in terms of the cultural forces which authorize them.

By highlighting the different cultural forces which give rise to different texts and arguments, I invite my students into contemporary academic discourse. The fundamental question of literary theory for the last forty years, for example, has been to what extent a text is a product of the historical discourses which brought it into being (as opposed to the view of literary texts as singular, timeless phenomena). I encourage my students to seek out interpretations other than their own and point out that the strongest arguments are those that recognize counter-arguments and rebuff or accommodate them.

My pedagogical philosophy privileges critical inquiry into the tacit assumptions that govern students’ everyday lives. The goal of my teaching method is to bring these assumptions to the surface and subject them to critical inquiry. My success as a teacher is to be judged by how well my students can apply their critical tools – critical reading, persuasive argumentation, etc. - both to these prevailing assumptions and to themselves.