My teaching philosophy is informed by many experiences, ideals, and goals. With so many influences in mind, it might be easiest to understand it like a 3-tiered pyramid, with a foundation, a middle, and a top. To briefly summarise, the foundation is Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed; the middle is formed by the various learning theories encountered in this course; and the top is what all of these things mean when taken together in the classroom. Together, this will ideally lead to a student-centred approach that accounts for the range of experience, learning styles, and strengths in the classroom. At the core of this pyramid are my goals to give students the skills for lifelong critical learning, encourage enthusiasm for learning and the material, encourage questions and dialogue, and provide space for continuous reflection and improvement for both myself and my students.
All of this is built on a foundation of Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it, one of Freire’s central arguments is that liberation of the oppressed is only found in communion with the oppressed. He writes, “Communion… elicits cooperation, which brings leaders and people to fusion…. This fusion can exist only if revolutionary action is really human, empathetic, loving, communicative, and humble, in order to be liberating” (Freire & Ramos, 2018). In the classroom, this means that I not only acknowledge my privilege as an able-bodied cis, straight, white settler woman, but that classroom engagement actively seeks to address and subsequently break down these systematic barriers through continual dialogue and interrogation with students. I can do this in the classroom through several practical means: acknowledging my privilege, stating my pronouns, encouraging students to look to Indigenous ways of knowing, and through land acknowledgements.
With this understanding in mind, I hope that my teaching will rely heavily, although not exclusively, on the following learning theories: sociocultural and humanism. These two learning theories are significant to my philosophy because they emphasize the whole person in the classroom, and both encourage dialogue and interaction. This means that I want my teaching to focus on the “freedom, dignity, and potential of the learner” (Hunt, 2020), that it is necessary to engage the learner as a whole (Hunt, 2020), and believe that we are all “striving for self-actualization” (Hunt, 2020). It is also grounded in the belief that “human intelligence originates in society or culture” (Hunt, 2020), and that individual experience is crucial and relevant in the classroom. This means showing students that libraries are not neutral, objective spaces, and encouraging them to see their own biases by acknowledging my own, as described above.
In the classroom, this will ideally translate into several different activities. The first is critical engagement and dialogue, which allows me to learn alongside my students, recognizing that it’s a mutual process. Second, that activities are focused on positive reinforcement and involve: group activities, scaffolding, cooperative learning, and discussions. In this way, I limit my teacher talking time, and encourage students to bring their own experience into the discussion in a critical manner. Assessment will ideally be formative and non-traditional. This means that assessments might be creative—say an artistic work rather than traditional essays or exams—and continual, so that students have the opportunity to fail and grow in a comfortable environment where it is safe to do so. Creative assessments are also important for demonstrating that knowledge takes many different shapes and forms. I also hope to incorporate peer-, teacher-, and self-assessment throughout, to encourage growth not only in my students but in myself as well.
My most formative experiences in the classroom have been with teachers who encouraged challenging and disruptive dialogue, shown vulnerability and humility in their own teaching, and incorporated creative assessments that challenged me not only intellectually, but also creatively. With their example in mind, I would consider my future teaching successful if I were able to foster such an environment in my own classroom. While ambitious and requiring a delicate balance, I hope that this kind of care, thoughtfulness, and attention to students will help disrupt the classroom (and structures beyond its walls) and foster an environment where my students and I all learn and grow together.