Teaching: One Transformative Action

Photo credit: sally_monster on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/sally_monster/5746218891/)

My vision is simple: I want to be a transformative teacher. I want students to experience at the end of the semester that my class has transformed their thinking and their mode of engagement in the world AND (equally important), in twenty or thirty years when they reflect back on their undergraduate education, they believe that their work in my class was transformative and an important component of shaping their life work.

I do not lack ambition.

At present, my teaching does not fulfill this vision.

The persistent gap between what is and what I wish to be. While the content of teaching may be concrete in general (I teach these books, these critical ideas, this body of information), the process of teaching is, I believe, the transformative element, and the process of teaching is quite intuitive.

This semester I learned an important element of my teaching philosophy through its absence. Generally, each semester, I require students to come and meet with me for twenty to thirty minutes in groups of two or three at the beginning of the semester. In these meetings, I discover who my students are, what are their dreams, what do they desire in their lives. These meetings ensure that I know my students; they give me some access to their all around humanness outside of the classroom.

This semester, the first few weeks were busy and in someone ways, perhaps, I was distracted. I organized these meetings, but they were not a requirement for all of the students. Only about two-thirds of my students participated. I felt the absence of knowing all of my students all semester. This is one mistake I will not make in the future. These introductory meetings will be a requirement for my students–and for me. They are a central component of my pedagogy.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy validated the significance of these meetings to me earlier this week. The Chronicle reported that a new Gallup Purdue poll indicates:

College graduates, whether they went to a hoity-toity private college or a midtier public, had double the chances of being engaged in their work and were three times as likely to be thriving in their well-being if they connected with a professor on the campus who stimulated them, cared about them, and encouraged their hopes and dreams.

 

My introductory meetings enable me to know the hopes and dreams of students and convey my caring for them. For me, these meetings are on transformative action, for me and for my students.

Filed under: lesbian, scholarship, teaching Tagged: feminist pedagogy, lesbian, pedagogy