Statement on Teaching

April 2009

Robin King, Lecturer in Writing

I can still remember vividly the context, content and logistics of the first class I taught at UCSC. Enrolled were 23 first-quarter students—with a teacher new to the university and a first-time teaching assistant—ready to embark on the first leg of their odyssey into college level writing and critical thinking. Poised strategically to tackle the Oakes College Core Course, "Values and Change in a Diverse Society," we were four African-American Woman, seven Latinos/os, one Filipino, three Jewish-identified students, eight European American Students, and one student who identified himself as mixed heritage—European and Mexican. Over our ten weeks together we heatedly discussed texts by James Baldwin, Sandra Cisneros, Patricia Hill Collins, Paulo Freire, Fan Shen, Elie Wiesel and other scholars. Also, since this was the fall of 1995, we explored then current events—such as the first Million Man March on Washington and Yitzhak Rabin's unprecedented actions in the Middle East. Students wrote papers on topics like the relationship between guilt and oppression, the political dynamics of language, media representations of ethnic groups, the formation of personal identity and the complexity of how culture generates silences.

What makes my memory of that first class so vivid is what so often makes the situations of writing students memorable and the teaching of writing so difficult to codify: Writing is personal. It is a discipline with no objective body of content or accepted set of rules. To learn to be a writer, one must unlearn much of what one has learned about how to be a good student.

With this sense of what it means to learn, in the spirit of critical pedagogy and liberation philosophy, I welcome my first-year students each fall by saying, “Now that you are at the university, one of your first tasks is to learn to read.” In reaction to my provocative assertion about their reading abilities, I expect students to be startled and chagrinned, but timidly and politely silent—because, after all, it is the first day of their college academic experience, and most of them are anxious and on their best behavior.

However, in spite of their silence, I expect and hope that these students run a potent internal response to my judgment of their reading skills, which might sound something like this: “What!?! …Uh, excuse me, but I KNOW how to read! HOW do you think I got into college?” A few of them look longingly out the windows or at the door.

At this critical moment, just before students run out of the room in search of a less insulting teacher, I reassure them that I do not doubt their literacy. Their very presence in the classroom shows me that they can respond to texts, and participate in what Brazilian theorist Paulo Freire describes as the “banking system ” of education—where teachers deposit knowledge, in the form of assigned readings and lecture, and then withdraw that knowledge by having students regurgitate it on tests and papers (71). College-level reading, I tell them, will require something more of them. Instead of knowing the "right" answer, the aim of real scholarship is to ask the right questions: College writing, in other words, requires active and critical responses to texts.

With this opening discussion I hope to encourage novice college students to move beyond or “unlearn” the passive, intake of information that passes for learning in most high schools. Instead, my demand is that students develop critical thinking skills that will help them face intellectual, social and academic challenges with integrity, participate thoughtfully in their communities, and play a role in shaping their own educations.

If what we bring to the act of writing is personal, the act of how we teach it is equally so. My gravitation to theorists like Freire, who insist that each student brings a different framework to learning, comes at least partially from the fact that I am a mother who has two sons with very different learning styles. By the year 2000, these differences had become extreme: my youngest son, who was then in second grade, was struggling to read and spell—a situation causing his teacher to keep my precious eight year old on her "worry list". Meanwhile, my older son, who was reading fluently by the time he was four years old, had once again qualified to be one of two students to represent his school in the Santa Cruz Spelling Bee—an honor he claimed for a second year in a row by competing against all fourth fifth and sixth graders at his school. In the eyes of the world, my older son is “smart,” and my second son less so. But as the mother who sees my younger son's intelligence every day in his humor, social skills, cooking and athletics, I am convinced less of the reality of different degrees of intelligence than of different learning styles.

Because of what my sons have taught me, when I think about creating opportunities for teaching in the spirit of critical pedagogy and liberation philosophy, I am reminded of innovators like Malcolm X, Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, and Thomas Edison—all who were not identified early in their schooling as leaders or creative thinkers; they were not—early in their lives—considered intelligent-minded people capable of making enormous and meaningful contributions to our world. (In fact, most of them were considered incapable of excelling at anything requiring consummate, articulate intellectual skills.) These luminaries made unique contributions to the world by eventually emerging into—or seizing—frameworks for intelligent learning and critical thinking. And this is what each student deserves—an appropriate framework for intelligent learning. In my foundational and advanced writing courses, such frameworks rely on four theoretical postulates:

• Writing can empower students by putting them in touch with their emotions and assisting them in thinking rationally, critically and creatively about a subject or situation.

• Students need to experience how others (not just the teacher) approach a subject and convert facts of a situation—who, what, when, where, why and how—into a coherent, unique, reader-friendly argument.

• Students can learn to explore alternative ways of conveying their ideas if they receive insightful and supportive assessment of their work—not when an assignment is returned with a grade and no comments.

• Students learn writing most efficiently when they become intimately connected with their writing and learning processes—and when they learn to apply critical and creative thinking to whatever interferes with their progress as writers and as learners.

I use these pedagogical claims not only to help students improve basic grammar skills, but to help students learn to write essays that, as composition theorist Peter Elbow writes, "take [readers] past an understanding of the ideas actually to hear the music of those ideas" (342).

Works Cited

Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: The Seabury Press, 1970.