Teaching Philosophy
- I was trained in the world of social theory (majoring in social relations and policy), and my understanding of that world greatly informs my style of teaching. Specifically I spent my last year of undergrad studying power relations, and a big part of that for me is always keeping it in mind when I am teaching. Teachers hold an incredible amount of power over their students, so it is incredibly important to me that I am aware of this, and take it in to account as a move through being a teacher.
- I draw specifically from Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the field in navigating the classroom. My students are fully realized individuals who have their own lifes and interests in and outside of the classroom. As a teacher I have to be aware of this, and aware of my own biases. I know that social studies, while it is the best subject, is not all of my students favorite subjects. While I can try and change this, ultimately I have to be okay with the idea that my students might have bigger problems on their hands.
- It is really important for me to make a classroom where students feel welcomed and valued. Far too often are children seen not as human beings, but as property themselves. The part of my own education that always made me feel the best was when my teachers treated me like I could make my own decisions, like I was an adult. So as a teacher I want to treat my students as deeply capable individuals, while also still affording them the grace of being children. They are experimenting and learning about the world around them, and we should be encouraging this growth.
- Within the world of social studies, critical thinking is also a deeply important skill, and one that I have been, and will be pushing hard in the classroom. In my classroom students will find themselves routinely asking where information is coming from, who is authoring it and why. Who is left out of the discussion, and why, who is it helping and hurting. Students should be curious about information like this, both in the classroom, and especially outside of it.
- When students feel welcomed into a community, when they feel respected by those who hold power, they tend to be far more willing to engage with work. Becuase of this I find myself utilizing the core practice of building respectful relationships with students to be hugely important. The quicker I am able to build respectful relationships with students the quicker our class starts picking up. My understanding of power dynamics plays a huge role in my ability to quickly build respectful relationships. A part of this for me, lies in knowing that my students will make mistakes. They will make mistakes that can be really annoying to deal with. But ultimately I know, even if I have to remind myself over and over again, that students are learning and exploring a very new, and large world. The least I can do is give them a chance, and let the day be a new day.
- When respectful relationships are established, students feel like they have a voice in the classroom. They feel like not only do I care about what they have to say, but they care about what their classmates have to say. From there, group discussions become rather natural, as students learn to explore both new ideas, and how to express them. Discussions in the classroom were eye-opening as the students and I quickly fell into Vygotskian dynamics. Me a Teacher-student, and my students student-teachers, there were material differences between us obviously, I was leading, and setting discussion, and topics. Yet, students continued to teach me more and more. While students work on how to articulate their thoughts properly, I am trying to properly elicit and interpret what they are saying. As the year went on, our discussions got stronger and stronger as students began supporting each other, and became confident in their ideas and abilities.
- When talking about maps with students, especially about using maps as representation for data, I routinely found myself having to explain and model how to read maps, and how to use them to display data. This ties into the critical thinking, as I challenged my econ students to first understand what a map was saying, but then also analyze it in a way that asks critical questions. Who made the map, why was it designed the way it was. What point is the author trying to make, and why? While these are skills that feel natural to me, and might seem like something everyone should know, how are students going to know if we don't teach them first! I talk more about my usage of maps here, and here!
- The summer between my senior year of university, and my internship year I spent reading works like Racism Without Racists, by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Discipline and Punish by Michel Foucault, The Wages of Whiteness by David R. Roediger among many others. This has helped me greatly with my proportionality as a teacher, as well as being comfortable with the material I may be talking about as a teacher. While mainly focusing my study on USAmerican history, I also made sure to spend some time with world history reading both Open Veins of Latin America, and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, by Eduardo Galeano, and Walter Rodney respectively. At the recommendation of a colleague in the College of Education, I also read Trauma-informed, Equity Centered Education by Alex Shevrin Venet, which was hugely important in building very respectful relationships.