My Teaching Philosophy, Second Draft

In Ancient Greece, aspiring teachers had to do these elaborate courtship dances, just as we do today in America (I'm kidding. Sort of.)

Teaching Philosophy: Language and Literature

In everything I do, I believe in asking questions, I believe in pursuing what is right and true, and I believe that life is best seen as a never-ending process of making new connections. I am completely committed to passing these beliefs down to future generations, and the way I do this is by teaching language and literature. Language is the basic tool of communication without which there can be no commerce and no progress. Literature is language as art, and belongs in conversation with the other arts such as dance, theater, visual arts, and music. As a language and literature teacher, I work together with the other teachers of the arts and humanities to expand the imaginative power of people, but my special ability is helping students gain the power to listen and speak for themselves.

Giving Students the Power to Speak I: Language. The whole world over, the traditional first step to connect students to other times and other places is to teach them a foreign language. I love teaching Chinese, and first-year Chinese in particular, because when students grapple with the four tones of Mandarin, or take up the brush to draw Chinese characters, they face a big gap between what they have known before and what is to come. I get to see them crossing that gap multiple times every day. I also love to teach English, my native language and the language of all the people, places and things that are most familiar to me. Teaching English offers up the story and the spirit of the English-speaking people, and I am proud to be a part of that story and that spirit. In both cases, students and teachers work together in a progressive, graduated course of improvement that leaves everyone with a more sophisticated and more adaptive vision of what language and culture and society really are. Once students have this vision, they take it with them in whatever they do next, because they have begun to understand the value of making connections.

Giving Students the Power to Speak II: Literature. Literature is the art of listening and telling. Literature in the classroom involves two reciprocal activities: reading and writing. When I teach literature, I make my students listen, and I make my students read. Then I make them tell, and I make them write. And then we start again. My literature classroom is an interactive workshop experience that aims to give students the power to speak for themselves. On the one hand, we ask questions about what we read and hear, we analyze the parts of what we read, and we learn the history of what we read. At the same time that we do this, we produce papers with beginnings, middles and ends. We write in complete sentences. And we learn to write with style.

The Great Multiplicity of World Cultures. Whether I’m teaching courses in Chinese literature and Asian studies or in Freshman composition and basic research techniques, I teach that literature’s great power is to tell the story of how we live and how we die, what we value and what we ignore, what we love and what we fear. As an American scholar of Chinese literature and culture, I make sure that the underlying lesson in all my courses is that there is great value in crossing borders, listening to others, and making connections. My greatest hope is that my students leave my classroom with a sensitivity to the delicate balance of human life, the perils we face in the world today, and the need to call on all our talents and traditions to form and preserve healthy, sustainable communities all over the earth.

Truth and Beauty. I do not value all literature equally. I discriminate towards the stories that have the power to move the reader, the depth to challenge the listener, and the tension, conflict and crisis that call out to us always to examine, understand, and question our values. My students meet an opinionated person of taste with an eye for quality and craftsmanship in his art, and I have found that they love to share in the great conversation on what is good, what is not, and where to find more good stuff. I teach great books from the Chinese and Western traditions, but I also teach film and television shows, letters, diaries and blogs, graphic novels -- powerful stories in any form, and especially stories of great beauty that resonate with the students and inspire them to seek truth in their own, unique ways.

Investment in the Institution. I want an active, transparent position in whatever institution I serve, so that I can make sure that I am fully engaged in my institution’s strategic plan for growth and development. I need leadership that understands the role of the humanities and the value of asking big questions about life, communities, and what we owe to each other as human beings. And as a teacher, I pledge to invest in my institution on a holistic level with a view to helping student learning – this may mean taking extra time to teach basic skills, or developing curriculum in collaboration with other faculty members, or adjusting my teaching to better fit within the larger university community. Good teachers need good schools.