Teaching Statement

"There is no discipline in the world so severe as the discipline of experience subjected to the tests of intelligent development and direction."

- John Dewey

My teaching style is built on twin foundations of experiential and community based learning. I am primarily an instrumentalist in my pedagogy, inspired by John Dewey's theory that "the only true education comes through the stimulation of the [student's] powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself." I have learned through ten years of experimentation in the classroom that didactic teaching is mostly uninspiring and ineffective. My teaching creates an environment wherein students interact with each other and with members of the community to learn by doing.

 

In my writing and communication courses, I defer to this "experiential learning" model by building my courses around large-scale final projects that require a semester-long commitment of time and resources. I assign students to project teams based on a first-week survey of their interests and technology skills, and a third of the class periods are devoted to workshopping these projects. In these workshop sessions, I employ a wide range of teaching strategies, working as tutor, mentor, project manager, and instructor, depending on the needs of my students. By creating a project-based classroom, I encourage students to build on skills they already possess, while acquiring new ones by working on these projects under my supervision and guidance.

 

The success of this style of teaching depends on what I call "big picture pedagogy." Students respond best to my teaching when they believe that the course, with its sequence of assignments, is moving towards something larger than a collection of assignments completed for a final grade. The cultural obsession with quantifying academic performance inculcates cynicism in many students who believe that grades are the only rationale for good performance. I try to break this cynicism by linking my course to institutions outside the classroom. Recently, for example, I have pioneered a client-based approach to teaching Technical Communication Practices at Georgia Tech. In this course, my students complete information design projects for non-profit organizations, learning written, oral, visual, electronic, and non-verbal communication skills in the process. The client relationship creates opportunities to focus the various writing and communication assignments--proposals, reports, memos, emails, presentations, etc.--towards a larger goal.

 

Often, pursuing the "big picture" means opening the class up to the community. I believe, as Dewey did, that the community should be present in the classroom, and I have followed this credo throughout my teaching career. At Delbarton School, my first teaching job, I developed a "genocide studies" curriculum and implemented it at the school; a key component of this curriculum was bringing Holocaust survivors from the community into the school to address my students. At Warren County Community College, I developed a World Religions course that took my students out into the community to meet with religious leaders. At Georgia Tech, my client-based technical communication course creates opportunities for students to interact directly with community leaders, educators, and businesspeople. Since January of 2008, my students have completed marketing brochures, training manuals, instruction manuals, websites, usability reports, and even billboard designs for Read Aloud Chattanooga, St. Pius X High School, Atlanta International School, Rossville Elementary School, and the athletic departments of Georgia State University and Georgia Tech.