The Art of Teaching
As a writing teacher, a central pedagogical goal for me is to help my students become: become thorough researchers, knowledgeable speakers, and therefore, effective writers. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, activist and educator bell hooks offers insight into her pedagogical motivations. She states: “I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer” (14). Learning is a reciprocal affair; both teacher and student must be willing to participate.
For hooks, as for me, “Learning is a place where paradise can be created,” and it is imperative for students and teachers to strive for the kind of “education that connects the will to know with the will to become.” If my students do not want to know, then it will be difficult for them to become. As a teacher, I sometimes struggle with finding ways to guide my students to want to know—to know themselves, to know the world.
Teaching is an art, one I have not yet perfected, and one that requires an inordinate amount of patience. Yet, teaching is also design, and necessitates employing strategies. In Quotations for Martial Artists, John David Moore calls upon French sculptor Auguste Rodin to “motivate and enlighten the modern warrior,” noting that, “Patience is also a form of action” (Moore 5). Sometimes I have to practice the art and action of patience in order for my students to discover what it is they do know, and who it is they want to become. This form of action, I hope, encourages my students to be active participants—in our class, and in their lives. My philosophy of teaching is ever-evolving. Much like the process of writing, I revise, adjust, and adapt it to whatever a given audience or situation requires. Rhetoric shouldn't just be taught, it should be practiced. I actively work to establish some core teaching goals, which come from unexpected places, as I explore in The Taming Power of the Great: A Three-Fold Philosophy.