Introduction
The Teaching Portfolio is both a labor of love and a trial by fire. As I place new pieces in the portfolio and take others out, I am constantly girded by the growth I see and indicted by my faults and failures. Like many teachers, I take the latter more seriously than the former, obsessed with what I’m not doing or not doing well, at least. Thus this portfolio of materials serves as an intellectual, pedagogical, and developmental history of a teacher-scholar. I have tried from the very first class I taught in 1994 to be a good teacher, a person who listens to and acknowledges the needs of students, who engages others in a search for knowledge and understanding, and seeks to include as many voices as possible in the dialogue that’s always necessary to transform facts, data, and experiences into meaningful learning.
But this portfolio also demonstrates pedagogies that I’ve used which failed to do any of my lofty goals. My work at Ogeechee Technical Institute and my early work at Georgia Southern University demonstrate, to me, a teacher caught in a current-traditional paradigm of learning, consumed by what Paulo Freire would call “the banking concept of education.” Although some may not see a problem with that, I do. Yet I know that even when I was “depositing” information into students – at least, I hoped at the time I was doing that – I was also breaking away from that model, transgressing it in subtle ways. My concern has always been students, even if that concern was not fully thought-out or theorized, or even when I didn’t understand this project as more complex than the merely transactional transfer of knowledge from teacher to student.
While teaching at Illinois State University, I watched my teaching develop a great deal, both in quality and in theoretical awareness. Even though I had switched to portfolio evaluation my last year at GSU, I was still doing a lot of lecturing about writing. My time at Illinois State, however, helped me to stop talking about writing and to start letting students write. Often, I wrote with the students. I worked more than ever to create a space in which we all had reasons to write and writing itself became an important vehicle for change, both of ourselves and possibly our readers.
Now, at East Carolina University, I rarely get the chance to teach first-year writing. Between administrative work and research, I find myself teaching primarily at the graduate level. This opportunity has given a chance to rethink graduate education, both the methods I learned in and the ones I sometimes wish I’d learned in, and to think about the connections between what we ask undergraduates to do and what we ask graduate and doctoral students to do. More than anything, I see my work as an educator of graduate students to be closer to peer mentorship than to what I used to think of as teaching. I want to welcome graduate students into the discipline of Writing Studies and to help them navigate such a diverse and complex field so that they can find out how their own passions, questions, and interests can contribute to a broader field of inquiry. It’s also important to me that I work to recruit and support students who will challenge disciplinary commonplaces and disrupt traditions so that Writing Studies might be come a more diverse and engaging discipline.
As you look through this portfolio, you’ll see a great many syllabi for courses I’ve taught, as well as some student evaluations. Not all of these syllabi and evaluations reflect well on me as a teacher, at least not as I see myself now. And I suppose they shouldn’t, as I believe that I need to always be growing, changing, evolving, just as the students I teach are never repeats of previous classes.