Emily Ponder

Teaching Philosophy
As I approach the end of my first semester teaching freshman composition, I have
formulated a Golden Rule that underpins every aspect of my teaching: Know thy
students. This means knowing more than just their names (although that’s certainly the
first step). It even means knowing more than their writerly personae, although this is
perhaps the most obviously crucial thing for a writing teacher to know. I strive to know
my students individually, and, which is the key, as a distinct learning community that is
different from any other class of students. This means that while I have particular
coordinates in mind for my students’ progress as writers, they determine what course we
take to meet these goals.
To teach my class as a unique body of writer-scholars, I first strive to foster a
feeling of community in my classroom and collegial camaraderie among my students.
My students work together, in pairs, small groups, or large committees, almost every day.
I position myself among them as a mediator, interlocutor, and instructor. Before and
after class, I chat with them about football games or their engineering group projects.
This lets them know that I care about their lives beyond our classroom, and that I am
invested in understanding their social and academic situation. Our syllabus approach,
UR@, is focused on giving students the skills and tools to locate themselves in our fast-
paced information age and effectively rhetorically navigate our social and virtual worlds.
Before I can help my students understand where they “are at,” I have to know where “at”
is. One stratagem that allows the students (and me) to pinpoint their social location is to
allow the students complete freedom in choosing the topics for their projects. Even as
they are each working on an individual project on a great variety of topics, I continue to
ask them to work in different groups. The students therefore see what their peers are
doing, and are able to situate their interests in relation to the rest of our learning
community. A recognition of scholastic diversity, and of their unique voice within that
diversity, is crucial to the UR@ approach within the context of a university education.
A more general, but equally important, aspect of knowing my students is
recognizing the demands they face as the generation brought up in the information age. I
cannot assume that all my students are tech-savvy (many of them are not), but I do know
that they will all be required, at some point in their professional and scholastic careers, to
navigate the digital world. As such, teaching composition can no longer be a matter of
just teaching “writing” in the traditional sense of text on paper. My composition class
demands multimodal composition and analysis. Whether we are working on writing an
academic research paper or creating a brand and advertising it, I am constantly
reinforcing the relevance of the skills that are used in completing composition projects.
In class exercises often involve finding examples of the work the students are doing in a
“real world” context. Once they recognize how essential rhetoric (textual or visual) is to
their future goals and outside-the-classroom lives, the students become much more
invested in their compositions—and their writing improves.
I am still learning about teaching. Each class is an experiment, every day brings
new revelations about my particular students and about my role as a teacher in general. I
embrace teaching as an opportunity to learn, and my budding pedagogy relies on my
ability to learn from and about my students even as I instruct them.