About+Me

My role as an educator is to provide avenues for dialogue between myself and the students, their peers, the text, and the world outside of the classroom. My is to foster critical thinking and reflection, provide room for collaboration, and facilitate the acquisition of new ways of reading and writing. I believe it is a teacher’s responsibility to provide varied, flexible opportunities for student success and ways of understanding. A teacher can achieve this though the creation of a living, student-centered classroom environment. As bell hooks writes, “One of the first things I do is bring my body out there with the students: to see them, to be with them” (//Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope// 157). This statement does not read as an invitation for a teacher to sit behind his or her desk and read from a rigid, unyielding lesson plan. A successful class meeting should live and breathe and be open to revision, while still maintaining a clear purpose and agenda. Students will be more likely to positively respond to an instructor who presents him or herself as thoughtful, accessible, and, most importantly, genuine in terms of the kind of interaction with students in the classroom and individual conferences. The importance is to work //with// the students (and not teach at them), while incorporating fair assignments that allow for a fair final grade. An effective teacher does not alienate the student. He or she should talk with the students and deemphasize the need to perform as student and teacher. This allows for a truly “student-centered” classroom. Effective instruction helps students to attend to the sources of their knowledge and asks for an examination of how one has come to know, as well as an understanding of others ways of knowing. Likewise, an instructor can lay claims to his or her own knowledge or principles of thought, but also promote and awareness of belief or understanding in process. To invite change and flexibility in ways of thinking from my students, I must also be flexible. I believe that an effective means of achieving this is to find ways to use my own experience as a model for my students. My way of knowing, and likewise my way of teaching, is be presented as “in process” as opposed to a series of unyielding truths that set have already set the decisions for me. Students must understand that the knowledge does not exist behind a locked door (and somehow the teacher holds the key to this door), but rather that they //are// the school within which they study, learn, and create meaning.
 * Educational Philosophy**