Teaching Philosophy

 

Teaching Background

Diverse teaching experiences have formed the core of my professional expertise. I owe a great deal of my perspective on language education to the students who participated in my courses in university, community college, adult education and high school settings; in the contexts of rigorous immersion, regular academic curriculum, and survival courses;  ESL, EFL, Russian, and teacher education classes. My teaching philosophy is work in progress, as every new teaching endeavor and novel interactions with students contribute to my continuing professional growth.

 

Developmental objective

Wittgenstein wrote that “there are remarks that sow and remarks that reap”. Extended to the educational setting this means that effective teaching foregrounds “sowing” rather than immediate “reaping”. Although teaching a certain set of skills, models, or ideas is an integral part of the teaching / learning process, I see the role of an educator as one that stimulates the development of students’ intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and that motivates them to seek out learning opportunities not only within but also beyond the realm of formal educational setting.

 

Learning / Teaching

My classroom practices are guided by sociocultural and ecological perspectives which understand learning as a participatory process. Students are not receptacles for knowledge (what Freire refers to as “the banking approach” approach to education), but active agents with their own goals and motives, cultural, social, and educational histories. Each student brings his/ her own resources to the classroom, and new resources emerge when students receive assisted performance from the instructor or from peers through dialogic interaction. Learning does not happen exclusively inside students’ “heads”; it also occurs in the space between learners and other members of the community of practice. Learning is very much a consequence of the quality of the social relationships established within this community. Collaborative activities afford opportunities for participants to mediate and assist each other in developing both linguistically as well as intellectually.

 

Diversity as a resource

Given that effective pedagogy depends on the quality of the social relationships established in a community of practice, it is essential for all members of a community to acknowledge and respect each other. My educational experiences with diverse student bodies have led me to appreciate multiple backgrounds, identities, cultures, and languages as valued resources for classroom interaction. To employ these resources, I introduce activities which both foster learner self-expression and appeal to students’ personal histories, intentionality, and inner voices. I take an active approach to materials development and encourage students to share their idiosyncratic meanings and ideas in a collaborative interaction. I believe that it is in heteroglossic environments that students are able to “submit” second (or, for that matter, first) language forms to their own intentions and tone, and to learn novel ways of conceptualizing reality.

 

Curriculum / Lesson planning

It is important for a teacher to provide students with appropriate orientation to classroom activities so that they will appreciate the internal logic of a lesson plan and understand how the planned activities contribute to student learning. Student evaluations and teacher-student feedback sessions are an additional fruitful venue for engaging in a constructive dialog with learners. I believe in sustaining a welcoming environment in my classrooms which welcomes students’ opinions, needs, and interests.

 

View on language

Language is more than collection of linguistic forms and arbitrary signs. I adopt the perspective in which language is viewed and taught as a semiotic tool for meaning making and thinking that emerges from participation in sociocultural activities. Immersion and content-based experiences are particularly powerful circumstances in this regard because they compel students to use language as a tool to achieve specific goals rather than as a goal in itself. The transition from language as goal of learning to language as tool for learning is essential.  Moreover, language should be appreciated not only as a functional tool but also as an aesthetic tool. Therefore learners must be encouraged to confront a wide variety of texts, including those of a literary nature and to experience these not just as reader but as author.

 

Reflective Teaching

I believe that “good teachers use their knowledge and skills for the benefit of their students, but also for their own benefit, deliberately creating settings and eliciting interactions that engender and sustain their own sense of doing a good job.”(Verity, 2000, p.181, citing Cummins, 1996). For this reason I am also a strong advocate of reflective teaching that promotes the collaborative exchange of pedagogical ideas, which can be carried out in a variety of venues from one-on-one discussion with colleagues to formal presentations at professional conferences.

 

Teacher as an observer

I believe that a teacher needs to be an observant researcher in the classroom, e.g. in terms of assessing the level of guidance that students need and tailoring his/ her help, evaluating the level of student interest in learning activities, and tracing development of students’ performance over time. Over the past three years, I have collected a rich corpus of classroom data, analysis of which has enabled me to uncover and address a range of problems with learner self-expression in L2. Based on these insights, I have produced exercises for advanced-level learners of Russian. Students express enthusiasm about my observant approach to teaching in their evaluations.

 

Teaching with technology

I am a proponent of technology-enhanced approaches to language teaching and learning. I strongly believe that an effective language teacher / researcher should be familiar with current instructional practices underlying the use of technology in language classrooms and should be well-versed in using, designing, and evaluating appropriate technological resources, activities and tools that foster language development and promote equitable, ethical, and legal use of technology by students. Increased access to and use of Internet-mediated activities by students in secondary and university environments and proliferation of digital technologies serve as compelling reasons for drawing on the emerging computer-mediated communication genres and technological resources by language teachers for the purpose of making language classrooms more authentic, engaging, and communicative, when appropriate. In my courses, I have developed pedagogical activities which involve the use of such resources and tools as blogs, discussion boards, wikis, WebQuests, web portfolios, podcasts, and corpus-based materials.

 

College of Education

Language and Literacy Education

Foreign Language Education

Linguistics Program

GA Department of Education