My favorite English teacher told me that we teach the way we have been taught. I believe that we also teach who we are. Let me try to explain who I am and how that influences my teaching.

I grew up in an environment where options of finishing high school or getting a Master's degree were not even discussed since it was as natural as eating dinner every evening. This environment provided me with was a deep respect for and value of education. Thus, I always try to make my students realize that what they learn will determine who they are and how others will see them and create activities that will allow them to discover the importance of knowing more and asking questions. For example, one class project I require my students to do is to research an event, person, or element that strongly influences their lives (an illness in the family, their parents’ job, their country’s politics, etc.) and to analyze how it also shapes their view of the world.

My own education has also taught me is an interest in the world. The variety of areas I was exposed to while growing up in multi-cultural and multilingual Switzerland certainly influenced me deeply. I believe that having a wide range of ideas fosters critical thinking and allows for more informed judgments. What this translates to in my teaching is the need that I feel to expose my students to a wide variety of topics--arts, politics and history, sciences, beliefs, cultures, languages, psychology, religions, literature from different countries. These topics can be incorporated in any creative way as parts of the curriculum or as extra activities, but in general, I have always tried to make them the overt backbone of anything we do in class. For example, last week we read a text found in a collection of articles for "people under the age of 25." This article, a good example of personal narrative, was a mix of facts and statistics about drug problems in Thailand, descriptions by the author of a Thai family touched by this problem, and personal information about the author himself when he was addicted to drugs earlier in his life. The class discussion that took place after my students had read the article was so intense that it once again proved how interested my students can become if given the chance to learn about the lives of others while learning about the writing process.

A last element gained through my own education is a need for communication. I always try to read extensively in all possible areas and genres, that is, not just about "education" but about current events, popular culture, and recent discoveries in science, for example. Indeed, with the age difference growing between my students and me, it becomes increasingly important to stay in touch with my students' world, with their beliefs and culture, with what interests them and catches their attention. The communication channels that we create are then extended to the real world. For example, because I read that only 58% of Purdue’s first-year students “socialized with someone of another racial/ethnic group” (report from the Office of Enrollment Management at Purdue), I recently asked my students to work on an ethnographic project that required them to research about and talk to people from different cultures and to compare these other cultures to theirs. Many students then expressed that they were surprised to find great interest in what they had learned for that project, and that they would no longer be afraid to talk to "different" people.

These are some of the ideas that shape my teaching today. My responsibility as a teacher is to teach First-Year or Graduate Composition. However, my responsibilities and goals are far greater than that: I will learn more every day in order to understand our world better so that I can prepare my students to live in it more effectively; I will show them the chance they have to receive an education, and the value of what they learn even beyond the walls of the classroom; I will follow the textbook and teach them effective writing skills, but I will also expect them to become avid learners, critical thinkers, and knowledgeable adults.

Septembre 2005