Alex's+Reflective+Letter

My Reflective Letter  I find it rather difficult to describe, with much confidence, the kind of teacher I want to become, let alone the kind of teacher I am at the present moment. I reflect on the lessons and units I’ve designed in previous semesters, the students I’ve tutored in writing and the teaching demonstrations I’ve presented, and the feedback—both the constructive and the critical—I’ve been given; and when I take out my old papers, folders, and video recordings, and set them out before me, I simply cannot say that any one of those artifacts, or even all of those artifacts taken together as a whole, truly reflects the idea (or the ideal) I envision of myself as a Teacher. But for all this uncertainty and all this indecision, I can make some generalizations, to illustrate some traits I strive to display in all of my work. I want to be a teacher whose students remain at the center of his instruction, who encourages social awareness and activism within the classroom and their community, and one who is constantly refining what he deems his best practices, by always reading and writing, conversing with colleagues (both peers and professors) and attending literary and pedagogical conferences. Below, I will describe the artifacts in this portfolio, and how they reflect, in various ways, my teaching philosophy as it currently stands.

Teaching students to discover literature’s significance to themselves and their generation is of paramount importance to me as a future educator—and __my__ __analogy__ __journals__ reflect this. But first, these require some explanation: we were assigned one of Aesop’s fables to read, articulate the moral it attempts to convey, and then connect that moral to our content area and our personal experiences. For example, we read the story entitled “The One-Eyed Doe,” the moral of which one could say is something akin to, say, danger comes from where we least expect it, or, we cannot make assumptions based on a limited perspective. I related the latter moral to a group project I completed in a past class, but also to my visit to the Heidelberg Project in Detroit, and how that experience altered my perception not only of the city, but also of art. Making these connections—drawing analogies—is a necessity for understanding and appreciating literature; and I can well-imagine myself incorporating similar assignments in future units I design.

The trouble, I find, becomes teaching texts relatable to students on a personal level and with which they can make those connections. And so I’ve taken to reading more Young Adult Literature (YAL). Most recently, I read //Marcelo in the Real World//, a story about a 17-year-old boy challenged with Asperger Syndrome who’s forced to integrate himself into fast-paced and normal-functioning society. I collaborated with three classmates on a unit based on that text and the theme of “solitude and society.” Preceding the unit’s design, I wrote a __book rationale__ for teaching //Marcelo//, the purpose of which was to justify teaching it as a core text. This short essay showcases a facet of teaching with which I tend to always find myself grappling, from the initial unit proposal, down to the last quiz question: knowing //why// we teach what we teach. YAL makes this question more easily answerable; its benefits to students, in relevance and readability alone, are many and various. And after having read several YAL novels—even having designed one unit around //Marcelo// and another around //The Alchemist// (which I describe later)—I feel more prepared to assign students texts that, while still challenging, they can enjoy and identify with.

YAL is not, in itself, an “open sesame” to students’ literary intrigue, and the benefits of teaching these texts come with notable controversies, a matter I discuss at length in “__Teaching Social Activism with Marjane Satrapi’s //Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood//__.” Satrapi’s novel deeply affected me, and I knew, immediately, I wanted to teach a unit based on it. I knew also that to do so successfully would require a clear and meaningful purpose and—because the novel is set in Iran—sensitivity to its cultural underpinnings, without which the teacher risks alienating and offending certain students depending on their cultural backgrounds and personal opinions. During my research, I read Mark Bracher’s //Radical Pedagogy: Identity, Generativity, and Social Transformation// and Christine Sleeter’s //Multicultural Education as Social Activism//; these texts greatly influenced my ideas and continue to inform my teaching philosophy. I envision my classroom being heavily student-centered. And to achieve that, to help students feel comfortable expressing their thoughts and feelings, in writing and speech—particularly about the novel’s intensely personal and shocking subjects—depends on my facilitating an environment conducive to that purpose. That is my role, above all else; if I fail at that, then I have failed my students.

__My unit on Paulo Coelho’s novel //The Alchemist//__ reflects that desire for student-centered instruction. The entire plan is based on the theme of “the personal legend,” that is, the lives we envision ourselves leading by following our dreams. And finding an audience, a grade level, for this concept was rather easy, as it couples nicely with the disposition framing the 11th-grade English Language Arts curriculum in Michigan: transformational thinking. Ultimately, that connection convinced me of this novel’s relevance and importance to students; it confirmed for me that my insights into the novel—about its philosophical and theological complexities, about the bold claims it poses to the reader—could appropriately be introduced to high school students. My __unit proposal__ explains those topics, as well as the other genres I incorporate, in detail. The learning activities section demonstrates my fairly student-centered approach: nearly every lesson, I ask my students to apply their prior knowledge to the text, to represent their thinking visually, or to collaborate on group- or whole-class projects based on unpacking the novel. And the purpose of all these questions and activities—through which I hope they construct answers, or at least more questions—consistently revolves around them—their personal experiences, their dreams, their sources of wisdom, and how these elements push them toward (or away from) their goals.

Somewhat related to this is my //__If Our City Could Speak…__// __culminating activity__, designed for a unit on nonverbal communication. Where my unit on //The Alchemist// centered on students exploring themselves, this asks them to explore their community. The prompt is that the mayor of X city is looking for freelance analysts to evaluate the appearances of and customer reactions to various businesses in the downtown area. In partners, they go into the field, record data on a location of their choice, write a reflection about their experiences, and report their findings to the class. What both this unit and //The Alchemist// share in common is this: the purpose always involves the students and their immediate concerns and experiences. Those are what I ask them to write and speak about regularly; and their attention to the //process// of developing and expressing their ideas—that is, with clarity, in an organized manner, and with evidence for the claims they make—comprises how they are assessed.

My interest in student-centered and process-driven assessments is evident in both my unit and culminating activity. The latter contains a detailed checklist which explicates the roles the students must fulfill and the order in which they must complete tasks (self-assessment) and a rubric that denotes the criterion on which they will be graded (teacher-assessment). My summative assessment on //The Alchemist// is, admittedly, less process-driven, but completely student-centered: I ask them to relate the novel to their lives, as a way of exploring their own dreams and goals and how realistic they are compared to Santiago’s. But the learning activities of the unit—creating timelines, mapping the plot of the text, creating visual representations of important scenes—are, by contrast, process-driven. The students must first read, re-read, engage in the activity, and afterward, reflect, with opportunities to revise. In fact, that statement summarizes my philosophy on assessment rather well: to assess students’ comprehension and skill authentically, they must be given clear instruction and time for revision. And because these assessments are interrelated so closely with their own lives and voices, ideally, they will become invested in both the process //and// the product.

A __conference__ I attended recently set me to thinking more about this subject, process vs. product. It was hosted by the Eastern Michigan Writing Project (EMWP) and the title was //Digital Portfolios//. I’ve been interested in portfolios for some time, but have never incorporated them into any of my curriculum designs, perhaps because I had little first-hand experience with them, both in my high school and university experiences. I left the conference with a lot of ideas and even more questions—which, at the time, were largely based on how under-financed schools could incorporate digital portfolios or rely, at all, on regular engagement with digital tools; later, my interest grew toward the various ways portfolios can be used as assessments, and authentic assessments, at that. The __teacher research project__ assigned to my ENGL 409 class let me explore this topic in greater depth. I found the answer was less than clear, as my __annotated bibliography__ suggests. And, indeed, I still only have more questions about the matter; I suppose I’ll only learn, in the end, by reading more (I am indebted to a particular professor who required those of us in his course to subscribe to one of NCTE’s journals. I am, in fact, still subscribed to and an avid reader of //English Journal//) and putting my theories into practice. Portfolios seem to me like the definitive student-centered and process-driven method of teaching and assessing writing; and I feel that only by integrating them into my future classrooms, like the other methods with which I want to experiment, will I come to know what kind of teacher I am.

I’m okay admitting I haven’t figured that out yet. But I’m okay with it because I am always consciously moving toward an answer, picking up methods, tools, and wisdom along the way, guided only by a few passions: for reading, for writing, for teaching, and for instilling within the youth of the world those very passions, in hope that they may take them and use them to become responsible, literate, and socially active citizens.