What Am I Doing Here

What am I doing here, in this class?  It's a good question for me.  I'm a fifth-year PhD student, with probably another year and a half to go in my program.  I'm in the process of writing my written prelim exam, and hoping to be able to complete my oral prelim by the end of the semester.  (Hoping!)  So in some ways, I shouldn't be in this class, or any class, and should just be focusing on the work for my exams and other program elements.  But I'm interested in teaching, and it's hard to let that go, regardless of what else is going on in my professional/student life.

I was not interested in teaching until just a few years ago.  Both of my parents (and some other relatives too) were teachers at one point in their lives and I was always encouraged to consider becoming a teacher, a suggestion that I rejected for numerous reasons - I'm too much of an introvert, I don't like kids, a lot of students don't want to do their work and it's a pain to deal with them.  But after spending two years teaching English in Japanese junior high schools (a job I took mostly because I wanted to live in Japan), I realized how much I care about education.  I realized that I had overwhelmingly positive experiences in all levels of my education, and that while I'd taken this for granted, not everyone had the same opportunities or quality of experiences.  I wanted to get involved with schools and with improving educational experiences for more students, so I enrolled in the U's principal licensure program.  Eventually, I realized that being a principal wouldn't be the right fit for me, so I switched to my department's PhD program in K-12 educational policy and leadership.  Because I was now a PhD student, I became eligible for a departmental graduate assistantship, and ended up TAing, and later being instructor of record, for a course required for all students getting a teaching license at the U.  The course covered the history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and politics of American education, all in 2 fun-packed credits.  This course has undergone a lot of change in its existence and will look completely different next year, as teacher preparation at the U is undergoing massive change overall.  So it will be interesting to see where the course goes.

Anyway.  I didn't want to have to teach this class.  My first year, I just TAed, which meant mostly grading and tracking attendance, and I could mostly just sit in the back of the lecture hall while the professor taught.  But my second year I became instructor of record for my own lecture section.  I was dead afraid of standing up in front of 40 students (40! that's so many!) and having to talk for 2.5 hours, week after week.  It was incredibly difficult for me that first semester - my heart pounded for hours before class, and for probably 30 minutes into each class as well.  Once I got going it wasn't so bad, but the anticipation before each class was terrible.  As a way to attempt to combat some of the dread, I started taking courses on teaching in higher education.  I took the U's main Preparing Future Faculty courses, GRAD 8101 and 8102, and also many workshops offered by the Center for Teaching and Learning and by the Center for Writing.  I also thought a lot about the materials I was teaching in my course on the social foundations of education for teachers-to-be, which included readings from Freire, Dewey, Greene, and others we're already touching on in this course.  But I'm still working through what it means to me to be a teacher, or more accurately, what it means FOR me to be a teacher.  How do I teach?  How do I want to teach?  How do my preferences, traits, and background inform my teaching, and do I want to accept those or change them?  If I change them, how and why?

These are incredibly loaded questions for me.  I am strongly informed by postmodernist and poststructuralist thought and I think I'm an existentialist at heart, so I resent feeling like I have to change myself in some fundamental way in order to be a good teacher.  (Or more accurately, to fit someone else's definition of a good teacher.  Let me tell you, in my field there's so much talk about "good teachers," and most of this talk is at the most superficial level.  When you consider how student evaluations play into how a teacher is judged as being "good" at the higher education level, things get even more complicated.) Can't I do things my way?  I want my students to be critical thinkers, to find their agency, starting with their thoughts and discourse.  I want to teach in a way that gets them there.

So my goals for this course really are to continue reflecting on these issues, on my teaching as it has changed over the years, and on where I want to go with my teaching.  I think it'll be useful to talk over these issues with people outside of education and with more attention to theory, as theory tends to get lost in discussions of "good teaching" as a checklist of things you can do (some of which are very helpful when you want to try a different activity or find some technology to facilitate discussion, for example, but obviously are not the whole story of teaching).  I'm interested in doing some auto-ethnography here and writing a paper I can take to a conference and/or journal.  And ultimately I want to find a way to be an effective teacher and still be myself.