One of my most prized teaching approaches and beliefs is the idea that learning can be fun. Obviously, this is a difficult, and sometimes seemingly impossible, but in actuality I really just mean that I prefer more activity-based lessons over lectures. I’ve always enjoyed classes that incorporate more engaging and hands-on activities, and I’ve noticed that my students also seem to prefer our more “fun” lessons where they can be mobile and interact with each other. Alongside this, I really value students learning from one another and teaching one another; as the class instructor, I find it necessary and useful to give students the time and space to engage in academic conversations, whether they are simply sharing and comparing their worksheets or creating research questions collaboratively. Group activities and class discussions can be fun and educational, yay for fun learning!
Another central belief I hold true to my heart is that learning should be practical in the real world. I distinctly remember sitting in courses like Geology and Pre-Calc and finding it difficult to stay motivated to learn and understand the material when I genuinely didn’t feel that I would use this information in my personal day to day life in the future. English 101 kind of has a nice advantage in this way because the curriculum teaches real-life skills- reading and writing and understanding research questions and data analysis are all very practical academic skills to perfect. In its most basic foundation English 101, if anything, should help students hone in on their critical reading and writing skills, which is an incredibly practical and relevant technique to improve on.
What we as instructors can teach students to write, or how to write well, is a tricky concept to navigate. What even is good writing? I’m not sure we can define this accurately. With that in mind, the writing and reading skills that I want my students to take in and embrace is the idea that we should write about things that matter to us, we should write about our passions. Passionate writing is good writing, or at least it can be. I want my students to write about things they are inspired by, things they care about, whether that be sports or politics or food or music, I think it’s incredibly difficult to dedicate the time and energy that “good” writing requires if they don’t care about the topic of their piece.
The last notion that I value in education is creating personal bonds/relationships between teacher and student. Students should feel valued, respected, and heard in the classroom, and having an instructor who knows and recognizes them as individuals with their own strengths and interests encourages the students to work closely with their instructor, thus improving their writing with one-on-one mentorship. It’s important to understand teaching and learning from a dynamic perspective. I think it should be fun and educational for both the instructor and students, it should bring new ideas and information to light, and most importantly, it should allow students to bring their own interests and passions into the world academically.