My Teaching Philosophy

First and foremost, I consider myself a student. Throughout my academic career, I have always maintained that I should be a student first– and an instructor second. It is out of this understanding, then, that my teaching philosophy is born. I am passionate about working together with students in a collaborative setting– about learning as much from them as I hope they learn from me. I am passionate about empowering students to take ownership of the texts they read in our classroom, and to feel capable of bringing those texts into contexts that make sense to them personally. I am passionate about deconstructing difficult texts alongside my students and rediscovering them together, in the pursuit of shedding new light on literature that may have before been in the shadows.

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Given that my academic background lies in Renaissance literature, primarily that of Shakespeare, it is one of my professional goals to work alongside students to bring these texts into our modern day setting. Shakespearean literature contains within itself endless applications to modern contexts– Hamlet should be analyzed within the framework of mental health, Taming of the Shrew should be analyzed through the lens of women’s voices, and Richard III should be analyzed in the context of gossip and rumor. These are themes with which the students of today are very familiar– they are contexts in which they themselves live and speak. In bringing
Shakespeare into these spaces, we not only give new life to the text itself, but we bring new meaning to these fundamental human experiences that have been thought about and written about for centuries. Through accomplishing this work together, I hope that both myself and the students I work with will not only see Shakespeare in a new light, but that we will come to a deeper and more complete understanding of humanity as a whole.

I am passionate about connection– about finding common ground among people who may otherwise seem irreconcilably different. Literature, I think, is one of the most fundamental ways that we can hope to accomplish this. For students that are interested in Literature, it may sometimes seem as though they live in a bubble; that the literature they connect with exists apart from other literature, or that even they themselves exist apart from other readers. In my classroom, I hope to eradicate this idea. Through reading authors like Shakespeare alongside contemporary works such as The Samurai’ s Garden by Gail Tsukiyama or relevant theory such as that of Simone de Beauvoir, I hope to begin the work of connecting Literature together. My biggest fear is that a student of mine might walk away from a class with the inclination that Shakespeare is purely a Renaissance author– that his work is only applicable to that time period, to the people that lived in that time period, and to the other works that were produced in that time period. Impactful literature, I would argue, says something timeless about the human experience. In this way, all Literature is connected, no matter how many years or miles separate them.

One of the foundational theoretical texts that I hope to apply to my philosophy of teaching is that of Simone de Beauvoir’s "What Can Literature Do?". Here, Beauvoir discusses the importance and role of literature as it exists within the human experience. Beauvoir writes, “Literature—if it is authentic—is a way of surpassing the separation by affirming it. It affirms the separation because when I read a book– a book that counts for me– someone is speaking to me; the author is part of his book. Literature only starts at that moment, the moment when I hear a singular voice” (Beauvoir 200). This, I think, is the center of my teaching philosophy. I hope to impress upon my students that Literature, at its core, is about connection– it is about transcending the physical boundaries of space or time in order to be changed by authors. Beauvoir’s theoretical writings act as the roots of this understanding.