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…keeps the questions at bay? (Kidding!)

On a more serious note, I wanted to share the bio I wrote for my Global Perspectives Program experience. (Those of you in Contemporary Pedagogy may also be interested in this as you write your Teaching Philosophy and think of ways to talk about your work and research, which is why this post has also been shared with you.)

Oddly enough, I really struggle with this kind of writing, and it took me a long time just to write what follows below. (So if any of you readers out there have comments or suggestions, I’m all ears!)

And here it goes:

Rachel Kinzer Corell is a MA student in English with a focus in rhetoric and writing, in addition to completing the Preparing the Future Professoriate certificate as a GPP fellow. A word nerd with an eye toward helping others find ways to communicate in context, she is very interested in the practical application of technical writing strategies to “real world” experiences. Rachel is currently Lead GTA for the Engineering Communications Program, where she provides in-house writing feedback and technical writing instruction to students in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering. (To date, her biggest challenge has been convincing MSE students of the reasons why they need the keen eye of an English grad student to help them communicate.) She also holds a MA in English from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where she focused on composition & rhetorical studies. Her research for her MA Capstone project at VT considers how professional writing consultants can use technical writing strategies through practical application, and how that writing instruction functions when it occurs outside its traditional home in English studies.

Prior to graduate school at Virginia Tech, Rachel worked in a number of administrative capacities both within and outside of higher education, although they all share a common thread with respect to professional communication. These experiences influenced her research interests regarding ways people use the means available to them to communicate more effectively, especially in professional contexts. In addition to teaching first-year composition as an adjunct faculty member for a community college and working as an online writing tutor, she has served as an office manager for a solo law practice, and worked in assessment and evaluation for a large, urban K-12 school system. She also has experience working as a communications assistant at a small art gallery, and as an administrative coordinator for an arts education nonprofit.

When she isn’t helping humans with her various professional pursuits, she spends time with her classy canine companion, Agent Margaret Carter. Those of you in and around the Blacksburg area may know her better as Peggy; she’s become quite the Avengers fan since her rescue in May 2013. You may also know Rachel as “Peggy’s person.” In her dream universe, when she is not at work helping humans in their quests to be better communicators, Rachel would have all the time and resources in the world to help rescue and train dogs.

 

 

Carr’s assertions of the production of stupidity on the internet are grounded in a similar argument made by Marshal McLuhan, whose famous aphorism, “The Medium is the Message,” is now more or less ubiquitous. It refers to a very similar phenomenon described by Carr in his examples of the clock and the telegraph, as well as Nietzsche’s use of a typewriter. McLuhan’s aphorism asserts that any message in a new medium is necessarily co-determined by previous technologies. Walter Benjamin writes of just this sort of effect of the relation between photography and commercial society: the photograph’s reproducibility exploded on the commodity scene as a revolutionary force.  Carr is outlining the passage from the enlightenment to now in a historiography of technology–somewhat arbitrary and incomplete. Was it not the enlightenment that first conceived of the rationalization of civil society, and the movement from mythological knowledge into scientific?

At any rate, I started skim-reading when I entered grad school in which I am assigned far too much reading than can be realistically done in the chunks of time given. Who can read 400 pages of dense theory a week for one class? And yet the pages are assigned, nonetheless. Some of the more honest professors will of course tell me that I shouldn’t even try to finish all of it. I can also say that I MUCH prefer reading deeply, and if anything is hindering me from that, it’s the bulk of readings I must charge through every week. That’s not to say that education done in this way isn’t useful, but it is to point out that my relation to the internet does not lessen my interest in deep reading.

Developed for more than two hundred years, economic literature has significantly changed the way people thinking about the economic behaviors, events, societies, and the world. Most of the economic issues can be examined as fact based on economic theories and methods – which is called the positive economics. In the meantime, more and more issues are reflected as value based on economic principles and ethics – which is called the normative economics. Economics provide us with the objective understanding of what the world economy is like as well as the subjective reflection of what the world economy should be like. Having Studied economics for almost seven years, I am always fascinated by the life philosophy that I learned from economics. And I hope to incite my students’ passion for learning economics and discover their value and meaning of life through learning of economics.

The world economy is complicated as it involves 7.5 billion people and 195 countries. To be able to understand the world economy comprehensively and detailedly, we will start learning from the microeconomics (such as individuals, households, and firms) to the macroeconomics (such as countries, continents, and the global world). We will have lectures with textures as well as discussions with dialogues. We will represent different groups of people in analyzing the economic activities as well as different views of ethics, morality, and fairness in improving economic welfares. We will develop a learning environment of inclusiveness and diversity as well as a learning atmosphere of heuristics and critiques.

Throughout the teaching, my commitment as a teacher is reflected in the three principles:

1. to nurture positive and inclusive learning;
2. to inspire creative and critical learning;
3. to develop a solid foundation for lifelong learning.

To accomplish this, we are obliged to follow the educational ethics and professional norms and maintain our mutual respects in and out of classes. In addition, we are all encouraged to make efforts to encompass these principles through individual and collaborative learning, diversity and inclusive discussion, problem posing and solving, and peer and self-assessment.

Individual and Collaborative Learning: Considering the different background of all students, I will design preliminary activities, such as first-day class survey and brief bio introduction, to help me identify the preliminary cognition of each student and tailor the instructional plan accordingly. After identifying individual background and preference, I will then suggest all students create small learning groups for collaborative teamwork (exemption cases are considerable but may require additional discussions). As an experienced student, I recognize that the best approach for learning is through a healthy and balanced combination of competition and cooperation, which can benefit classroom learning and management at all levels. To promote this learning process, I will prepare constructive lectures, assignments, and projects in concert with the curriculum schedule.

Diversity and Inclusive Discussion: Being an international graduate student, I’ve fully acknowledged the diverse existence of individual values, social norms, cultural ethics, religious beliefs, nurturing environments, etc. And this experience has contributed a lot to the development of my inclusive, respectful, open-minded personality. So in my class, I embrace all efforts that make our learning environment full of inclusiveness and mutual respects. However, inclusiveness does not necessarily mean consensus. In other words, I encourage every student to speak out their understandings, concerns, agreements and disagreements in a mutually respectful manner. By establishing a diversified and respectful learning environment, we can learn more than we may expect otherwise.

Problem Posing and Solving: While lectures and discussions are useful in helping students memorize and understand the course contents, they may be not enough for students to thoroughly apply, analyze, and extend the knowledge materials. Problem posing and solving exercises provide students with great opportunities to bring out a real-world economic issue, to apply what we have learned to make a professional analysis and find the feasible solution(s). Not necessarily has it to be an unprecedented or splendid issue, but it is suggested to be extensive and creative. For examples, it can be a study with a novel method of analyzing and modeling the previous findings, or a critical assessment of the previous literature. Throughout these exercises, students will develop the way of thinking and understand the economic issues as an economist.

Peer and Self-Assessment: Lion F. Gardiner once wrote that “Assessment is essential not only to guide the development of individual students but also to monitor and continuously improve the quality of programs, inform prospective students and their parents and provide evidence of accountability to those who pay our way.” To make these assessments, we will implement a set of peer and self-assessment basics, such as individual portfolios (assignments and exams, etc.) and teamwork projects and presentations (problem posing and solving exercises, etc.) to measure student mastery and evaluate the overall performance that students have accomplished according to the course objectives and anticipatory sets.

For these years of study, I have shown my enthusiasm and effort of learning and teaching. Following the above basic principles, I am confident of being a professional teacher and have well prepared for being a professional teacher. I understand that teaching is the toughest work in that it may shape a student’s life enormously. And I hope that teaching with passion, efforts, responsibilities and sincerity will ignite my students’ desire for life-long learning.

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This is a draft of my teaching philosophy. Any useful suggestions (such as words, paragraphs, or grammars) are welcomed.

This weekend afforded me the opportunity (and time) to think deeply about my teaching philosophy. “Do I even have one yet?” I’m actually not sure. I think I do. Maybe? I have little ideas about what I believe is effective and what is not. I have opinions about what is right and wrong. Honestly, the idea of formulating a teaching philosophy still seems a bit daunting to me. It’s easy to be hard on yourself when you can’t come up with the perfect words to say.

I took a break, I listened to some podcasts, and I stumbled across an article that helped concentrate on what I felt to be most important in this quest. The article, titled The Headwinds/Tailwinds Asymmetry: An Availability Bias in Assessments of Barriers and Blessings, addressed key situations we often find ourselves in that lead us to feel as if the world is against us, the headwind is hindering our progress, or the hand we’ve been dealt is not ideal.

According to the article, these inherent biases cause (directly quotes from article abstract):

 

This week’s topic made me revisit some of my convictions about teaching and learning, bringing these essential questions back into my mind: How do teaching and learning affect each other? Is the relation between teaching and learning unilateral or bilateral or completely separate? Are these processes simultaneous or sequential? Or do they have a temporal pattern at all? How does the form of teaching inform the content of learning? I see that my answers to these questions would significantly differ from my experience as an undergraduate student than my experience as a teacher. The former me would have fundamentally different answers than the latter. Observing the extent and the depth of this gap, I came to appreciate the power of Paulo Freire’s approach to pedagogy, which inspired me to review what I knew about the epistemology of teaching and to start shaping my teaching philosophy. For me, Freire draws a road map to becoming an influential educator by inciting curiosity and by providing a variety of information that will guide the students to find who they are and what they want to do with their life. My take away from this week’s readings is that both the teacher and the students embark on a journey together in which they learn from, they are inspired by, and act in solidarity with each other as they create an environment, which embraced the joy of learning, promotes braveness, and builds trust.

 

I believe, referring to educators as “learned scholars, community researchers, moral agents, philosophers, cultural workers, and political insurgents”[1] in the Freirean sense highlights an important aspect of the role and the position of the educator (70). According to Freire, teachers should focus on multifaceted critiques of dominant power in designing their curriculum, which encompasses curricular and instructional strategies. The actions informed as such should aim at creating a better learning environment, as well as at establishing a better society. Thus, for Freire, individual empowerment, which incites social change, cannot be thought apart from the learning process.

 

I am not sure whether Freire’s framework would be appealing for all educators, but his observation on the way in which the educational institutions can be both impediments or chances to fight oppression. His entire work and education philosophy has been focused on mapping the strategies, which he referred as “liberatory action” [2]  and which enable students to intervene in dehumanizing processes within institutions. In that sense, his approach has emphasized a process-based model of teaching in which students is empowered to think free from the dominance of the previous knowledge and to imagine their future free from the imposed norms and standards of the society through the development of their conscious.

What makes Freire approach distinct from the conventional teaching approaches is the way in which he problematized teacher’s authority. While he underlines the necessity of a type of authority that “respects the being and experiences of students”[3], he strongly opposes an authoritarian pedagogy, which operates by making “deposits of information in student mind banks”[4] and by making the student demonstrate learned information, as s/he is asked to “give it back to the teacher in the same form it was provided to” her/him. Freire conceptualizes the way of learning based on such relationship as “banking pedagogy.”[5] The students are considered as “”containers,” into “receptacles” to be “filled””[6] by the narrated account of the teacher.

 

Freire argues that the one-way structure of the relationship between students as “the depositories”[7] and educator as “depositor,” does not only produces a misguided system but also tear off humanity out of students. In breaking the cycle of reproducing the same knowledge in the same form, he offers an alternative method, which he called problem-posing education. Freire juxtaposes both approaches regarding the roles and positions of the student and the teacher/educator in detail. I found that among three of them had answers to my questions. First, this approach removes the hierarchal positioning between the teacher and the student in banking pedagogy and brings them to the same level where they create the knowledge together. It also embraces the student’s effort to develop consciousness and attempts for critical intervention in actual conditions. Finally, in problem-posing education, “people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves.” Within this process the lines that divide the roles of educator and students blur, leading both of them to reflect simultaneously on themselves.

 

Going back to my questions, I see that Freire’s thought would answer most of my questions:

To learn, then, logically precedes to teach. In other words, to teach is part of the very fabric of learning. This is true to such an extent that I do not hesitate to say that there is no valid teaching from which there does not emerge something learned and through which the learner does not become capable of recreating and remaking what has been thought. In essence, teaching that does not emerge from the experience of learning cannot be learned by anyone^[8].

 

I argue that Freire would address the relation between teaching and learning as a bilateral unfinished process in which both of these actions take place both simultaneously and sequentially, claiming that particular instances of learning may happen independently. According to Freire, the form should not dictate the content in the process of learning and teaching, since” the process of learning, through which historically we have discovered that teaching is a task not only inherent to the learning process but is also characterized by it.” Although I am not sure whether I can commit to such a passionate and ambitious agenda of teaching, I came to realize that Freire’s contributions to philosophy and epistemology of pedagogy and his courage to seek ways to deal with the actuality without referring the suppression of past. Most important of all, I am thankful for bringing a new perspective, which challenges the monopolization of knowledge not only by individual actors but also certain forms of teaching that are capable of transcending our humanity, paving the way for dehumanization practices.

[1] Kinchloe Joe L., “Paulo Freire (1921-1997)” in The Critical Pedagogy Primer, 2004, 70.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Kinchloe Joe L., “Paulo Freire (1921-1997),” The Critical Pedagogy Primer, 2004, 74.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Freire, Paulo, “The Banking Concept of Education,” Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1993, 71.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Freire, Paulo, “There is No Teaching Without Learning, ”Pedagogy of Freedom, 2001, 31

This is the first time I hear about Paulo Freire. Therefore:

1. Forgive me for my ignorance.
2. Forgive me if I make erroneous assumptions with respect to his views, despite reading this week’s material.

I am certain that I won’t be able to write a very informative opinion about his work. Regardless, I am glad that I’ve been been exposed to it because I find it very interesting.

I am a fourth year PhD student in Economics. I work with econometric models, programming and big data. I stress this because my blog post reflects the way I was trained to think. “Trained to think” is the key here.

A Culture of silence

This is something that I have seen happening in higher education, at the highest of levels. For instance, I recall a core PhD Economics course I took during my first year. It was a mathematical, self styled positive economics course with rigorous proofs and real analysis. However, the Professor would go on and make normative conclusions such as: “and this why X will NEVER work”. When I asked him about the Cambridge Capital Controversy, he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. I was bewildered.

Here is an example of a man, a Dr., a Professor, so entrenched in the way he was “trained to think”, that he had never even heard of the positive counterarguments to his positive arguments.

What would a critical pedagogical praxis look like in Economics?

I can only write how a critical pedagogical praxis should NOT look like in Economics. Firstly, we need to be more critical about our discipline. For instance, maybe we should try being less absolute. Think less the way we were “trained to think”. In addition, we should be taught about the great debates and controversies in the development of Economic thought. I find that reading about the history of your discipline is important to understand in depth why we believe what we believe today. Why certain things are taught and some others not. Why an entire generation thinks homogeneously and a slight deviation could tantamount to academic suicide.

It is only when we stop thinking the way we were “trained to think” that we will start thinking.

This post is actually inspired by a comment I left on a classmate’s post (for the Contemporary Pedagogy course I’m taking this semester) that I really liked. (See Elizabeth Clark’s “What’s in a Name” if you’re interested.) It’s a great example of using an acronym as a starting point for outlining one’s teacher “voice” or identity, and I thought it would also be a good starting point/crossover for my initial Global Perspectives Program blog post since we’re all still in the process of getting to know one another/defining ourselves within the contexts of higher education. At first, her use of an acronym reminded me of an episode of the TV show 30 Rock, where Alec Baldwin’s character Jack Donaghy is trying to make a decision regarding the two women he has romantic feelings toward. “All right, Donaghy,” he says to himself. “Follow your heart.”

Source via llemonliz.tumblr.com It’s never not funny to me, and it’s a reference I tend to make any time I notice someone having a mind/heart decision-making struggle. At any rate, her post then got me thinking about how I would make my own acronym to describe my teaching voice. It’s an interesting challenge, to be sure. In the spirit of sharing, here’s what I came up with for myself: RACHEL = Real: I am my real self around my students… because I want them to feel comfortable being their real selves in my classroom. (See also: And in life!) Aware: I am aware… that my students have different goals and needs with respect to writing instruction. (This means I do everything I can to help them meet their goals in the context of their own lives, not just my classroom.) Charmingly Self-Deprecating: I am charmingly self-deprecating… which means I’m always one to poke fun at my self to remind my students that no one is perfect. And that’s okay by me. (This one came from a student during my first round of student evaluations way-back-when, and it’s something I’m oddly proud of, I guess.) Humorous: I am humorous… because a well-timed quip or comment during class is one of my favorite ways to reach students. (This is inspired by all the teachers I have had over the years; each one found ways to teach us to learn and to laugh, and sometimes how to do both at once. It doesn’t have to be all seriousness and rigid structure for a learning environment to exist.) Empowered: I am empowered… by those who taught me in the past, and by the students I teach now, to share knowledge and help others. (I got this one from her post; I think it’s an important one.) Loyal: I am loyal to the idea that we can all be lifelong learners (e.g. our ongoing self-education through the lives we live), to the focus of my discipline (e.g. effective communication), and to my students (e.g. supporting their goals and identities while pushing them to learn as much as they can). …By the time I got to the end of this, I felt like a pro at the whole acronym game, hence the cheesy title of “The Ac-ron-y-mous B.I.G.” But I can’t be the only one. What’s your acronym for your teaching identity?