As an English instructor, the art of powerful teaching for me begins with student learning. That is to say, my teaching paradigm is driven by this question: what cultivates the most intellectually productive, richly diverse, and personally meaningful learning environment for students? For instance, for the non-English majors enrolled in my course The Interpretation of Literature whom are either often unfamiliar with or alienated from literary studies, such a constructivist, student-centered approach is an essential guiding principle for making sure students thrive in uncharted territories.
It is within this terra incognita where my values of collaborative leadership and other-oriented community support student learning. From the first class when students “meet, greet, & tweet” each other with introductions taken from their “classroom biographies” to the final period when they facilitate a Socratic-based, interactive film discussion on Terrance Malick’s A Hidden Life, students take ownership of their education through ongoing, collaborative processes with student-initiated debates on Walt Whitman’s fraught poetics, think-pair-share small groups that scaffold together “interpretation boards” on Hannah Crafts’ Gothic aesthetics, or live-stage performances of Mia Cuoto’s “War of the Clowns,” a flash-fiction, closet drama on mass media performances. This collaborative leadership with students translates into trusting relationships in an other-oriented community, built on mutual understanding and personal kindness, alongside intellectual rigor and spirited disagreement. In this way, I move beyond “transmission” or “sage-on-the-stage” models of instruction to empower and support students with unique perspectives to work together, not apart. I set the stage for powerful learning, but students take center stage.
However, this is achievable only with essential learning goals in mind: close reading, compelling writing, confident speaking, careful listening, and critical research. In English, these “5 C’s” are the core skills of the discipline and translate to nearly every other domain of human experience. Therefore, I intentionally and strategically structure each one of them into the curriculum to allow my students to cultivate these skills throughout the learning process. Typical days might have students sleuthing around Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet for “keystone passages” that help them find “keys” to unlocking the novella’s many mysteries on criminality and close reading in se (like Holmes the master interpreter himself), but also, exploring how interrogating these very passages that hold the story together can help spark new questions and possible insights as they create in-class exploratory boards for developing their own paper ideas. Other days I pair confident speaking with careful listening as students practice “logic traps,” attentively listening to their peers’ oral arguments on scenes from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, while correcting them in real-time when they hear any logical fallacies or potential weaknesses. I also like to get students rummaging through the library stacks and digging in online archival databases in order to develop a final research paper and symposium project where students share their original research with display boards, oral presentations, and even live performances.
I believe an inquiry-based curriculum and differentiated pedagogy to be best. This takes shape in “planning backwards,” whereby my students and I work together on a social contract to create learning goals that students will meet by the end of the course, drawing off both my expertise on the literatures of slavery, and students’ own curiosities and questions. In doing so, I pose challenging, personally-relevant questions each class period for them to address and answer.
This, quite naturally, informs my desire to differentiate pedagogy to meet students’ diverse identities and learning needs. Diversity, equity, and inclusion have always come to the fore in my approach to teaching. But, to truly reach students where they are at, intellectually, emotionally, and personally, I put a range of diverse, engaging instructional methods into practice. Multimodal mini-lessons on war memoirs such as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried get students openly dialoging with television interviews and newspapers from the Vietnam era. Engaging activities like “passage pass” help students to wrestle with confusing passages from Zora Neal Hurston’s Barracoon, giving them opportunities to refine pre-scripted, close readings, line-by-line, for large group discussion. I also search out engrossing, supplementary readings, offering students illuminating and accessible context before they tackle, take, for example, the zombie’s knotty and religious (Haitian voodoo) histories in modern television (e.g. The Walking Dead) and film (e.g. Get Out). Even for reticent students, “clear the air” is a quick strategy I use where students early in the class period can vent frustration and uncertainty, even joy over their readings and assignments, increasing their comfort and likelihood to speak up later on.
Of course, I insist on fair, robust assessments that illustrate a well-rounded portrait of a student’s progress or need for intervention. To do so, I offer formative assessments through the ongoing, constructive feedback (audio and written) for each major student pre-writing prompt, rough draft, and manuscript submission. I also utilize summative assessments, such as essay exams and oral presentations, to test students’ core learning goals (e.g “5 C’s”), including a self-reflexive portfolio project that students use to meditate on the most meaningful concepts and impactful experiences from across the semester. Formal assessments, like argumentative or exploratory essays, are of course staples in my teaching repertoire, but also balanced with informal assessments that monitor student progress on a daily basis, like “check-ins” and “circle-backs” to re-teach, and end-of-class “exit cards” to gauge comprehension, instantly.
Most importantly, however, I always strive to be a reflective practitioner—attentive, self-critical, and adaptive—to which practices in my teaching foster powerful learning. As a new faculty member, I would bring nothing less than this same reflective spirit and commitment to teaching excellence for my future students (evidence of which can be provided upon request or found on this site, ryanfurlong.org).
Dr. Ryan David Furlong 