Teaching Portfolio
Important! Students, please be aware that this is not the course home page. If you seek the course homepage, please go to the menu and select "Current section" or use the link below. The teaching portfolio is always in progress. Presently, I have a teaching and learning narrative and my teaching philosophy posted. In due course, I plan to post assignment sheets, syllabi, etc. If you still need a better picture of me as an instructor, feel free to browse my current course website.
Also important to remember is that this is a section continually in flux: the contents will rarely remain the same for more than a semester, and sections will be added and removed as my experiences dictate. Thank you for your understanding. Eventually, I will add assignments, syllabi, etc. Expect an update within the next two weeks.
Teaching Philosophy
Last Update: 2005 - Revision coming soon.
Students entering the university in our digital age have been raised in a culture in which instant access to information is not only possible, but also commonplace. That "to Google" is now a verb is one of the most accurate indicators of this phenomenon. Students coming from this environment have a good number of advantages; however, the same instant access that can inform them of the basic elements of coursework in many disciplines can prove detrimental to the relatively slow processes involved in writing.
Students in my courses will learn to slow down. Scholars of composition readily admit that they do not fully understand "how" people write. Although in many respects, students have been composing small texts for a number of years (via text messaging, e-mail, etc.), some will feel "blocked" when attempting to write in a more formal context. The job of the composition teacher is basically twofold: first, he must move the student beyond this block, after which he can teach the student the various genres in which college instructors will expect him to write.
Ultimately, my approach is - as my education might assert - rhetorical. My students grow to understand that their work needs to be approached situationally: exigence, audience, constraints, available resources, and a fitting response. In order for this approach to work, the assignment must be stated as clearly as possible. If an instructor himself is unclear as to his expected results, he cannot expect students to somehow enter his mind and comprehend his desires. Second, we must teach students as many planning techniques as possible: free-writing, listing, flow charts, webs, clustering, even pictures of the subject. After students understand their own thoughts on a subject, the teacher must begin his second job: teaching them ways to arrive at the desired outcomes of an assignment. In this case, the instant availability of the digital world can be a great help, rather than a hindrance: students can see multiple versions of a given "genre text" in a matter of moments, and from these, they can develop (with the instructor's guidance) their own set of guidelines (not rules) for writing a particular document.
After students understand their ideas and what is expected, they will begin writing the first of several drafts, the revision of which I will support through several guided activities, including group conferencing, bulletin-board discussion (which can be used throughout as a support for freewriting and the creation of guidelines), and peer-to-peer conferencing. This stage of the writing process is crucial, and as instructor, I must tread a fine line: if I am too intrusive, the students will write only what I (as authority) tell them to; however, if I exclude myself too much, many students will not take the peer-conferencing seriously.
I know that I am both young and inexperienced, and given time and experience, my philosophy and methods will change; however, I also know that students in this era of instant access must learn to slow down to write well. In my classroom, through all of these steps, I hope that they do. I hope that when they see the quality they can produce if they slow themselves, they learn to respect themselves as writers and understand that they can write. It may not always guarantee success, but it will help if we can slow them down and engage them over time.
The contents of this site are, unless otherwise posted, copyright © 2008 Christopher Berg. For more information, please visit the Permissions page or e-mail me at chris[at]cbberg.info