TEACHING/ PEDAGOGICAL PHILOSOPHY

As a prospective teacher, my aim is to use identity, background knowledge, and values to my advantage to motivate students to begin a personal and attitudinal exploration of collaborative learning through communication and technology. Using social media to incorporate a student’s personal life and their academic life through technology can be accomplished through small or large group collaboration as well as a one-to-one process if needed. I will continually practice and refine my pedagogical strategies of incorporating Facebook, and other social media to help students not only build a sense of community. Writing is a social act, and I strongly believe that the Internet has a lot of effective tools that facilitate and help student writers to become aware of their skills when it comes to digital spaces

            In addition, my role as a prospect teacher is to lead by example by, first, further my own skills in technological skills using media and collaborating with my peers to work on student centered activities that would assist student learners and writers.  Because using social media such as Facebook or blogs to mind the gap of f2f instruction, I am working on continually researching how to make better use of Facebook applications and other videos, images, and digital texts. In my own work as a blogger, for instance, I have found the satisfaction of commenting on my own work and freely expressing my ideas in a public platform. There are times that the thought of cyber security creeps in the minds of all of us, mine too; however, just as any other element out there in the world there has to be risk and the knowledge that not everyone is out to get us.  For this reason it is important to empower the student and give them the upper hand with technology security through explicit training computer technology. Minding the gap for students from f2f to digital spaces grants students the agency and autonomy to become effective communicators in their everyday lives.

            Another aspect of student learning is membership. Students are in a sense novice learners who must be introduced to what good writing is, and to read expert’s scholarship in the academic realm. For the student to become aware what it is to be a member of an academic writing discourse, as a prospect teacher it would be my duty not only to model different writing styles but also to select scholarship in different fields of studies. Their awareness of how experts use and discuss literature is a good way to introduce students to academic membership. Because metaknowledge and meta-awareness is essential to enter the Burkean parlors of conversation, so to speak, the students will be exposed to different genres (posts, blogs, group collaborative writing, tweets, an textual enhancement tools) to explicitly start to recognize technique, voice, style and rhetorical devices that experts use when writing. Along with how experts partake of the conversations, the students will incorporate technology with MLA through miniature presentation. For instance citation practices and references/work cited procedures would be explicitly drawn attention to. Students will be able to recognize different sources in journals, newspaper, a database, or other online data source. According to Bokser, being able to use one’s imagination to gather the appropriate intellectual tools help students become better writers (44).

            The importance on focusing in genre specific texts and incorporating writing conventions such as MLA will better allow that student to recognize in his or her own writing the importance of critical thinking. Because my focus will be student-centeredness, the use of minor tasks such as the KWL chart is one of many ways to assist student with their own critical skills. A comprehension strategy that activates background knowledge and get them to write down what they know, what they want to know, and writing what they have learned. Basically, put another way, it is about reading, writing, and thinking. Such tasks are meant to facilitate student thinking and to be scaffolded into the process of writing.

            Ultimately, my goal is to, gradually, have students develop a sense of ability to do certain task such as writing, analysis, and observations to enter expert conversation. The focus here is to get students to feel confident about their writing. The goal is to have the student’s zone of proximal development (ZDP) as discussed by Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, to thus gauging the students metalinguistic and metaknowledge of writing through exposure of different writing genres.