Educational Philosophy Paper 2
Educational Philosophy Paper 2
Educational Philosophy Paper 2
Warpinski
7/28/2016
Respect and Relevance: The Cornerstones of Effective Teaching
Abstract
I believe that the key to successfully teaching secondary communication
arts is utilizing relevant materials to teach relevant skills, and to do so while
maintaining the utmost respect for the student, the community, the students
parents, and oneself. To ignore the importance of relevance in communication
arts is to render the subject obsolete. To attempt to teach any skills without
maintaining a culture of respect is to ensure the students learn with resentment,
at best, or at worst, not at all. Both respect and relevancy must be always
forefront in my mind as I attempt to teach secondary communication arts.
Introduction
The efficient and successful teaching of literature and communication to
secondary students is predicated on building a classroom culture of respect and
relevance. In order to cultivate a culture of respect, I must always show respect
for students, treating them as unique and important individuals, with unique and
important lives. I must also show respect for the community, mainly by fostering
positive community-building between students and by respecting the sanctity of
the parent-student relationship. I must also show respect for myself, living a life I
would be happy to see my students living. While respect is paramount to
successful teaching, to teach communication arts, specifically, I must also make
relevancy a priority. To do this, I must critically examine the texts I use for their
ability to impact a student, making sure that they see themselves represented in
high quality texts. The texts themselves should be expanded to include nontraditional literary forms to reflect the changing modes of communication.
Finally, students should be exposed to and able to practice forms of
communication that they will be able to utilize outside of the academic sphere, as
most communication they engage in will not happen within the confines of a
traditional education setting. If my primary goal as a teacher is to nurture
students to eventually succeed in the world at large without my assistance, then
making respect and relevance the cornerstone of my teaching philosophy is not
only desirable, it is necessary.
Respect
students not to talk about their personal lives, and then turn around and expect
full engagement on assignments and activities. They feel as if the key to effective
learning is to separate the learner from the person, but this is an impossible task.
How often in a day is one so submersed in a task that no other thought or
emotion can permeate? I, for one, am often distracted by outside factors.
Thoughts of, what will I have for lunch? when will my sister call me back? is
Fiji going to win the gold in mens rugby? have intruded on the writing of this
very paper. I am a grown adult who has learned to focus despite these
intrusions, but our adolescent students are still learning, and are not as
experience in doing this. Furthermore, the issues on their mind may have far
more significance and importance than whatever task they have been assigned in
the classroom. Acknowledging our students as individuals, with lives worthy of
being shared, can encourage them to invest in a class or activity.
It has been found that teachers that exhibit behaviors that students find
emotionally supportive are able to successfully elicit greater engagement from
those students (Ruzek, E., Hafen C., Allen J., Gregory A., Mikami A., and Pianta R.,
2016). As a student, teachers that I felt cared about me we able to elicit more
effort on my behalf, and more engagement in classroom activities. In my
experience as a teacher and teacher-observer, defiant and disruptive behavior is
minimized when a student finds themselves in an emotionally nurturing
environment, which allows for enhanced learning for all.
If our primary goal is to nurture independent adults, then we as teachers
must give our students opportunities for autonomy in the classroom. The five
basic needs everyone has are survival, love, power, fun, and freedom, and
students will choose behaviors and actions that they feel best meets their needs
(Glasser, 1990). Autonomy is nothing more than freedom plus power, and giving
our students autonomy in the classroom meets these needs, thus giving our
students their own motivation for engaging with learning.
There are many ways to promote autonomy, but two ways I will embrace
are allowing students to write the classroom rules, and utilizing inquiry based
learning projects. Having students write classroom rules gives them power over
their situation, while also allowing them the freedom to decide what behaviors
are important for them to encourage amongst their peers, (Erwin, J., 2004). In
this way, students find themselves investing in the structure and order of the
classroom, instead of being oppressed by a system that has been imposed upon
them. Inquiry based learning projects does for their academic behavior what
rule writing does for their non-academic behavior, allowing students to have
input on their learning while still being guided (Hmelo-Silver, C. E., Duncan, R. G.,
and Chinn, C. A.,2007). Since the state and federal learning standards for
communication arts are based more on skill acquisition than factual retention,
inquiry projects are an ideal way to facilitate the learning of said skills while
giving students the freedom to choose the form and content for learning those
skills. When self-reflection is added, as is often necessary with inquiry projects,
there is a tangibility to the power they have over their own grade. While
students always have the power to change their own grade, they often feel as if
grades are doled out by a higher power, and therefore out of their control.
Asking a student to create their own rubric and then grade themselves on it
makes them aware of the power they have in their own hands, and gives them
the freedom to make an informed choice about what to do with that power
(Eppink, J. A. 2002). It also allows students to create projects that play to their
strengths.
The teachers I have known personally usually get into the business to
improve the lives and abilities of students, but I dont see how that can happen
when a teacher is indifferent to the varying needs and situations of the students
they teach. Every student has different strengths and weaknesses, and many of
those are out of the students control. Disregarding these differences or requiring
students to overcome them independently lets a lot of students fall through the
cracks of education, and inhibits their learning and success. If a teachers goal is
to improve the lives of their students, they cannot do so without compassion.
For as long as I have been alive, homework and school have gone together
like hockey and ice. As a substitute teacher, I have seen homework regarded with
such respect that even third-grade students were required to complete it at home,
even if they had the time and motivation to complete it in class. To me, this is
unreasonable. The act of assigning homework for the sole sake of assigning
homework is meaningless, as poorly designed or over burdensome assignments
can actually hinder a students achievement (Berliner D., and Glass G., 2014). To
complicate matters, not every student has the ability to complete school work at
home. Many secondary students may have jobs or families to attend to, or may
be overloaded with extracurricular activities, as I was as a high school student.
In their article From Safe Spaces to Brave Spaces (2013), Arao and Clemens
talk about the need to create a learning environment that allows students to
engage with one another over controversial issues with honesty, sensitivity, and
respect, (p. 135). I believe it is necessary for secondary students to address
issues such as racism, poverty, sexism, and war to facilitate their transition into
adulthood, and that a communication arts classroom is the ideal place in which to
do that. However, as Arao and Clemens discuss, doing so is not without risk.
Despite this, the risk inherent in these subjects should not be used as deterrents.
Students, particularly secondary students, are already familiar with death,
sexuality, violence, and drugs, and to try to shelter them in the classroom is an
insult to the student, and artificially hinders the growth of their interpersonal
relationships. Yet neither should classrooms be used as a bully pulpit, to teach a
narrow and restrictive interpretation of these issues. Instead, students should
feel free to discuss their opinions as they are, and be ready to confront
problematic behaviors and attitudes, both in themselves and others. To do so, we
must cease the assumption that schools and classrooms are somehow removed
from, and therefore protected from, the world at large. Yes, students are learning
the skills and behaviors they will need to be successful in their adult lives, but
while they are doing this, they are still interacting with the world at large.
Utilizing a brave-space mentality, one where they know they cannot be fully
protected but are still encouraged to engage with challenging ideas and materials,
can help them practice their communication abilities on their peers first, and
then on the world at large.
our profession, our judgement, and our lives will be devalued in their eyes. What
teenager wants to learn from someone they perceive to hate teaching? If the
things we are teaching have lead us to a miserable life, what motivation will our
students have to learn those things? The answer is none. Everything we do is a
model for our students, from the way we interact with our peers and superiors
(other teachers and administrators) to what we eat. They are watching us,
learning from us, and we must show them that we are people worthy of being
learned from.
Relevance
There is a strong trend among pre-service communication arts teachers
toward embracing the concept of relevance as a way to foster student
engagement. This is not an idea held just by my peers and I, but rather it is
supported by professionals and academicians alike. There is a strong positive
correlation between an educator making schoolwork relevant and the student
increasing their engagement in the schoolwork, and the more a student feels that
the school work is in line with their personal goals and beliefs, the more they are
willing to invest them self in the work (Assor A., Kaplan H., and Roth G., 2002).
At its core, relevance is the marriage of pragmatism and existentialism.
With relevant material, students can tap into their own, unique, personal
motivation. Relevance also connects learning with the world at large, showing
students that they are part of the world, not removed from it. Choosing relevant
teaching materials often means supplanting traditional texts. Tradition is a
strong motivator for many teachers. After all, there is a familiarity in tradition,
student I was taught that in Hemmingways The Old Man and The Sea, the old man
was an allegory for the Christian messiah. I didnt come to this conclusion on my
own, but rather memorized and regurgitated my teachers analysis. Instead of
teaching me how to analyze, she taught me what I was supposed to see. That
made analysis a non-transferable skill. If that had been the entirety of my
literature education, I would be unable to pick up a recently published book and
analyze it for its message, tone, or quality. As a teacher myself, I feel that
students should be able to analyze writing that they could potentially actually
read in their day-to-day life, not just elevated examples of literature. They should
be able to pick up any book or article, or watch any movie or television show, and
have the skills to draw their own conclusion as to its meaning, not wait patiently
for someone else to do it for them.
Media literacy
While literacy has always been a primary goal of communication arts
courses, it is necessary in the digital age to expand our definition of literacy.
Understanding and synthesizing the written word is as important as ever, but it
must be placed in the context of its format, which has expanded from the
traditional forms (novels, articles, poems, essays, etc), to also include social media
outlets, such as Tumblr and twitter, which have their own rules for structure and
grammar, as well as to include non-written texts, such as movies, vines,
television, and advertisements. Students interact with and consume all forms of
media at high rates, and yet are often lacking in the skills necessary to evaluate
those media, or produce high-quality media themselves (Redmond, 2015). If we
wish our students to be able to navigate non-traditional literary forms with the
same skill we teach them to navigate traditional literary forms, then it is
necessary to augment communication arts curriculum to include these modern
forms of communication.
I also believe that teaching the skill of contextualization is necessary, for
both traditional and non-traditional texts. I have seen numerous examples of
students who attempt to write a formal essay in the same language with which
they talk with their peers. Conversely, I have seen older adults struggle to utilize
social media because of their inability to grasp the peculiarities of online
grammar and semantic structure. The solution to both of these issues is teaching
contextualization, that is, teaching students to craft their language so that it is
appropriate for both the form and audience to which it is intended. There has
been some effort in the past two decades to incorporate historical
contextualization into the teaching of traditional texts, effectively asking the
students to view the texts while considering the time and place it was published.
That same process can be applied to non-traditional texts, both in
comprehending it, as well as considering how to create original texts. One does
not write an academic essay in the same language as social discourse on a
blogging platform. Each have their own rules for grammar and sentence
structure, and failure to adhere to those rules can result in dismissal by the
audience in either case. When creating texts of their own, students should be
instructed to consider the expectations for language of their audience. Doing so
not only has the potential to make students more effective in communicating
across different forms, but also has the potential to ease barriers put up by
speakers of English dialects that are not represented in dominant society.
I am of the opinion that the ultimate goal of media literacy should be to
prepare students to effectively communicate long beyond the conclusion of the
course. We as teachers must keep in mind that we are teaching them the skills to
craft texts they have not even considered yet and evaluate and analyze texts that
have not yet been created, and in doing so we must also consider that the forms
for those texts will not necessarily be the forms of texts of the past. To put it
simply, we are teaching students to navigate the future, not the past. I do not
think traditional forms will die off, so it is necessary that students be able to fully
engage with novels and essays, but I also do not consider digital mediums to be a
fad, and if students are going to be engaging with digital literatures for years to
come, we cannot ignore those mediums in the classroom. To do so is to handicap
our students communication capabilities.
Real-world applications
As with media literacy, giving students real-world applications for the
communication skills they learn is an important step in fostering relevance in the
classroom. Can the average student comprehend the terms of a lease? Can they
suss out bias in a newspaper article? These are important, real-world
applications for the skills they learn, and practicing in the classroom gives them
the structure necessary to be successful at it. Being able to write these types of
texts can be important as well, especially since the rise of citizen-journalism and
blogging. These days, a person can make a living from blogging about their daily
lives, as does my own cousin, who writes a weekly column about being a
widowed mother of two. With increased automation in the workforce, content
creators will be in ever more demand, as part of a worthy and viable profession.
Our students must be made ready for this.
We should also not neglect the benefits of teaching creative writing skills.
While it is unlikely that many of our students will go on to receive the acclaim of
writers like Stephen King or J. K. Rowling, to deny any of them the opportunity to
explore that option themselves is unfair. Furthermore, creative writing has a
demonstrable effect on self-esteem (Chandler, G. E., 1999), and those who write to
process their emotions often espouse the benefit (Lamott, 1994). Our students
can also benefit from engaging in creative writing endeavors, and as creative
writing utilizes the manipulation of language to create specific moods and
emotions, students can transfer those skills to not only other writing projects, but
to non-traditional texts as well, such as video.
There is no need to wait for a student to become an adult for them to
engage with broader audiences. Giving them opportunities to publish online, or
even just for their peers and communities can give them a sense of belonging that
will increase their motivation on that and future writing projects. Encouraging
them to engage with topics relevant to their community can nurture community
relationships while also giving students a sense of power within that community.
Even small projects, like maintaining a class blog where students can post their
best work, has the potential to give students a feeling of connectedness, and
therefore encourage their participation in the learning process.
Conclusion
Respect and relevance are not the totality of effective teaching. There are
other methods and practices that should also be incorporated, such as inclusive
classroom design, cross-discipline projects, and student-centered learning.
However, all of these practices come from a place centered in respect, with a
mind toward relevance. It is only by respecting our students, our communities,
and ourselves that we can expect to receive respect from our students, free from
an oppressive system that perpetuates ideas of inequality. It is only by making
the coursework and materials relevant to our students lives that we can allow
them to motivate themselves, instead of coercing them into an activity they do
not find beneficial. It is only by seeing our students as whole, worthy people, and
treating them as such, that we will be able to nurture them into becoming the
successful and autonomous adults they are all capable of becoming.
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