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CURRICULUM VITAE STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY I teach from a belief that the classroom should be interactive and should explore the connectivity between the world and the classroom, and that diversity and pluralism play a crucial role in the classroom. I strive for a classroom that:
At LaGuardia Community College, I teach Basic Writing, Composition I, the Research Paper, Creative Writing, and selected 200-level literature electives such as Introduction to Poetry and Images of Women in Literature. I also teach the capstone course for Liberal Arts majors, Liberal Arts 200, using the theme “Cultural Studies of Medicine” or "Flawless Futures: Fixing the World Through Fiction." I have a firm commitment to student-centered teaching and problem-posing education as a result of studying Freirean, feminist and multicultural theorists. I rely heavily on the theories of pedagogues such as: Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Henry Giroux, Cynthia Selfe, Kathleen Yancey and Victor Villanueva. From these theorists, I have learned to structure, explain and energize textual material by using discussions, work stations, free writes, debates, peer review, and “hands on” assignments. I have also been greatly influenced by my additional research and studies since graduate school. For example, my work at the NEH Medicine, Literature and Culture seminar has guided my teaching in my Cultural Studies of Medicine course. My institutional work with ePortfolios has transformed my writing classrooms. In all of my courses, I work to create a stimulating and engaging environment for students. For example, in Introduction to Creative Writing, I ask students to collect “overheard conversations” in elevators and on subway cars as a way of understanding dialogue for short stories. In Basic Writing, I ask students to find a sign in their community with a grammar error in it. They take a picture of the sign, bring it to class and we create a PowerPoint presentation showing the signs and the ways to fix the grammar errors students have found. In all of my courses, I use student facilitation of class as an important site for evaluating what students have learned. In addition to leading class discussions, students have also written and directed class plays, made “video poems,” written letters to local and national elected officials, conducted oral interviews, kept diaries about elections and candidates, conducted research symposiums, and created educational materials for distribution to the wider college community.
Although we studied cancer, epilepsy, and HIV/AIDS, many of the student projects focused on HIV/AIDS. Jennifer did a charcoal drawing of a female relative recently diagnosed with HIV. In her drawing, the black cloth represents the disease slowly taking over the body. Sophia also chose a visual presentation for her project. Her painting, entitled “Casual Sex” was accompanied by an autobiographical piece about the sex education she received in Greece as an adolescent. She compared that education to the public health education curriculums the class discussed as part of our HIV/AIDS section of the course. Teaching and working in a college with a largely immigrant student body, I have My English 101 Martin’s Field project, designed in conjunction with Dr. Richard Lieberman, and archive staff members Susan Waide and Brian Gurian of the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives, further demonstrates this pedagogical practice. I designed my Spring 2001 101 course around issues raised by a playground in Flushing, Queens called Martin’s Field. Primary historical documents, provided by the LaGuardia and Wagner archives, including an archeological survey, letters by activists and city officials, burial records, newspaper clippings, and maps, showed that prior to a 1930s era Works Project Administration conversion to a playground, the area had been a paupers’ cemetery. The issues surrounding Martin’s Field offered the chance to teach an unfamiliar historical event as a way to push students to develop a greater understanding of the history that precipitated some of today’s social progress, as well as created some of our current social tensions. I asked students to study Martin’s Field through several different critical perspectives, including the changing nature of community population, the history of Flushing, race relations in the United States, issues of public space, and the relationship between activists and elected public officials. My goals in teaching the project were to familiarize students with the research process, to introduce them to researched writing on the college level, to introduce them to primary and secondary sources, to introduce them to field work, and to guide them through the process of enhancing their critical thinking skills as they developed research questions and interrogated primary sources. I was also interested in connecting student writing about Martin’s Field with a concrete outcome: a research symposium and a packet of resource materials. The culmination of the project was a public research symposium featuring the students and local activists. Students also prepared an individual final research paper, an article appearing in the college’s internal publication, Live Wire, collaboratively written position papers, pictures from a group field study, and a packet of research materials recording our class process. Since I believe that education should help students to make connections, between their lives and the curriculum, and between different areas of study at the college, I often teach English 099 and English 101 as learning communities, team teaching with faculty from history, sociology, or business. In these courses, I use the thematic concepts from the other course to inform student reading and writing. In my “Fighting for Our Rights” learning community, which is connected to an Introduction to Sociology and History of Social Movements courses, students read political literary texts to find connections between the philosophical basis for social movements and the way literary production articulates that philosophy. In Fall 2006, students in my course read and wrote about Orwell’s 1984, Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed, and Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. Their papers for my class reflected their studies about organized social movements for civil rights, for economic justice, and for the environment. Since graduate school, my other major area of growth and development in teaching has been in the use of educational technology. In 2001-2002, I attended a year-long “Designed for Learning” faculty development seminar to learn how to incorporate technology more effectively into my classroom. Since my training in “Designed for Learning,” I have taught all of my courses as hybrids, spending half of the course time in a traditional classroom and half of the course time in a computer lab. In all of my courses I use Blackboard, the Internet, and LaGuardia’s new ePortfolio system, for which I have served on the research and pilot teams, to enhance the culture of teaching and learning in my courses. While technology is sometimes considered suspect—as a “bells and whistles” approach to teaching—I believe the integration of technology into the writing classroom is invaluable. In my courses, students immediately grasp the important idea of writing as a public product, something to be read, discussed and responded to by the whole class. The transition from public writing to professional writing will be an easier move as students develop their academic skills, shifting from college careers to their professions. I have increasingly designed assignments that combine creativity and critical thinking. My recent integration of the new ePortfolio achieves several key goals: it relates to the fast-paced, technological world we negotiate daily, showcases writing skills, demonstrates creativity in solving design or technical problems, and relates to the course content, revealing what students have learned during the semester. This represents significant progress in my own teaching and comfort with technology. For me, the ePortfolio represents a change in how I teach writing, and how writing pedagogy is moving increasingly into public and digital forms of communication. As my students begin to think of their writing as a public forum, they take a new sense of pride, and more importantly, ownership over their own knowledge production. For many students, the ePortfolio also allows them to connect their personal lives, educational goals, their course work, and their work lives, finding ways to expand the classroom walls. Coupled with best practices of staged writing and revision, the ePortfolio also opens up new opportunities for students to reflect on their progress. At the end of one semester, a student wrote in her ePortfolio about her development as a writer in a Composition I course:
In the same course, another student wrote:
For both of these students, the ePortfolio provided an opportunity to think about what they learned during the semester and to concretize the gains they made in their writing. From the ePortfolio to the final projects in Cultural Studies of Medicine to my Martin’s Field project, teaching, for me, is based on my passion for sharing my love of writing and reading, and understanding the critical relationship between education and social power. I believe that teaching makes a difference in the lives of our students. In want each semester’s teaching to connect the world in which we live to the classroom, making the classroom an expandable spaced, a living and lasting place which the students carry with them long after a semester ends. Return to C.V. |
J.
Elizabeth Clark, Ph.D. (lclark@lagcc.cuny.edu)
 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Site Credits: This site was last updated on 13 May 2009. Site designed and maintained by J. Elizabeth Clark. Technical Assistance provided by Delwar Sayeed and Priscilla Stadler. |
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Sample Lessons: Statement of Teaching Philosophy Public vs. Private: What's Okay to Share? |
In my Fall 2005 Cultural Studies of Medicine class, students were immersed in both writing and critical thinking as they responded to texts about medicine and culture. Here, you can see a quilt panel students made in response to reading Rafael Campo’s The Desire to Heal. After studying the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt as a concrete example of the ways in which AIDS has intersected with politics, religion, science, culture, and history in the United States, students made quilt panels for each of the HIV+ patients appearing in Campo’s narrative. At the end of the course, students were invited to create their own original artistic responses to illnesses, along with a written artist’s statement, situating their work in the context of the readings we did as a class on culture and medicine.
learned to emphasize the importance of student-centered learning and the connections between classroom and community, helping students to use the classroom as a site of acculturation to an often new and confusing New York City identity. For Sophia, the cultural comparisons between Greek and American public education proved eye opening as she compared the two cultures that she straddles.