I've made the transition from high school to college twice, initially as a student and later, as a teacher. The first time, I went from a small Quaker school to a large state university: my teachers felt so remote (they were so far away in some of the lecture halls that they spoke to us through microphones) and I didn’t often recognize that they were scholars, engaged in their own work, while they read and graded mine. The second time, I went from teaching high school English in a drop-out prevention program at West Philadelphia High School to teaching in the writing programs at UMass-Amherst and later, at UPenn. My transition along the continuum of educational privilege and investment was profoundly disconcerting and compelled me to think explicitly about my role in educational opportunity and responsibility. I began to develop my philosophy of teaching and writing during that time, struggling to figure out how writing connected to communication, scholarly work, and responsible citizenship. I realized that my job as a teacher was to help my students see that good writing was responsible, honest, rigorous, attentive and clear, and that these qualities extended beyond the classroom and into their engagement with the world.

When I started teaching at the college level, I was confronted by the ways that high school writers often enter college with a rigid set of rules about writing (never use I, shape your introduction as a funnel, restate your argument at the end) and an occasionally intense anxiety exacerbated by the conviction that, unlike everyone else, they aren't good writers.

My first goal as a writing teacher is to challenge these assumptions by encouraging students to become more conscious about the process of writing and revising, to remember the fundamental purposes of writing, and to see themselves in a dialogue with me, a fellow writer who has also struggled with the sublime abyss of the blank page and returned to share with them what I've found. That dialogue models how they should communicate with their peers, both about writing and in writing. In addition, challenging their assumptions about writing sets the stage to challenge more fundamental assumptions about scholarship and the world, particularly through research and close attention to the ways texts work. They learn that if you really slow down and let a text speak to you, it will open itself to you and reveal so much more than anyone would expect at first glance. It is their job as writers to show what they find to others. Even if close reading as a technique resides in the realm of literary study, its premise extends across the disciplines.

Unlike some of those lecture hall classes I remember from college, a writing class is the ideal place to address issues of technique and skill. Indeed, the issues are interrelated: in order to be good writers, students have to return to the rules they learned in high school, understand them, interrogate them, and then realize what good writers and scholars know: all choices should be conscious ones and good writing sometimes requires learning, but then rethinking or even breaking some of those rules. Such an approach to writing can be both intimidating and exhilarating, since it requires students to think about why they make each choice and consequently recognize their accountability and agency as authors.

My philosophy of teaching is primarily a practical one. I try to identify problems and find solutions, both for the class in general and through one-on-one dialogue with students. During our conferences, I am also able to diagnose their particular problems and encourage students to focus on finding solutions in subsequent drafts. I often remind them what I learned from Jean-Michel Rabaté: that grammatical mistakes are often symptomatic of unclear ideas, and can serve as markers where they need to interrogate those ideas further. I hold students accountable for not making the same mistakes in subsequent papers, asking them to use my comments on previous papers and drafts in their newer assignments. I encourage them to discuss strategies with me, with their peers, and with tutors in the writing center so that they can think about the ways different audiences respond to their arguments and prose. I encourage them to face that blank page again when they revise, talk to their family about what they are trying to say in an essay (reasoning that their families must be pleased as punch that they are in college and happy to hear them work through ideas), remain committed to saying what they actually think rather than what they think a teacher wants to hear, and remember that rhetoric, despite the way its (mis)represented in the media, is a vehicle to use language instead of force to affect people's thinking and behavior.

I am committed to decentering authority in the classroom when it's appropriate. I do this by encouraging students to call on each other during discussions, to write down their thoughts and share those thoughts with the person next to them before we transition back to a class discussion, to find ways to disagree respectfully. A productive classroom is one where things might look a little chaotic on the outside as students grapple with ideas and ways of expressing those ideas; at other times, it's a quiet place as I let students digest a difficult question and I silently curl my toes waiting for someone to say what they think. I've learned to live with the anxiety that accompanies both the din and the silence because the silence allows us to reflect on ideas without rushing to judgement and the din helps us remember why the discussions are important in the first place. I also decenter authority by letting students see me struggle with ideas so that they can see that scholarship means just such struggle and that the primary difference between them and me is experience.

Ultimately, my philosophy is one of attentive intellectual honesty. Students need to remember what they knew when they first began writing: we write to communicate, to convince, to soothe, to entertain, to engage and to articulate ways of entering into the discourses of the university and beyond. We write to leave our mark on the world and, although it's rarely easy to do, it's always worth the effort.