Content Pedagogy
Concerning the content of teaching English I, the subjects I chose to focus on the most and teach were: reading, writing, and critical thinking. These three subjects, especially reading and writing, however, are often taught in isolation. I sought out to emphasize to students the interconnectedness of all these ideas. Therefore, while reading, I pointed students to specific strategies and tools that the writers were using and encouraged students to experiment with those same strategies and tools in their own writing. I remember once making a big deal about how one author constantly uses dashes as a major punctuation mark in her writing. The next thing I knew, I started seeing students' writing inundated with dashes--sometimes incorporated brilliantly, sometimes not. However, I encouraged students to always take risks, to experiment in their writing, to try new things. If something doesn't work, we can reflect on it and change it until it does work. The connection between thinking critically about our reading and writing also goes the other way. I noticed students beginning to talk differently about the reading we were doing after we focused intensively on writing. For example, I remember a time when a student pointed out that an author we were reading uses a lot of fragments and run-ons, but this student said she thought that was okay. The student was able to articulate why she thought the author was making those choices, the effect those choices had on the reader, and why it was thus okay to break with conventions in those choices. This is the type of thinking I was constantly trying to pull out of students. I loved it when I saw students making connections. To me, this is what learning is about--creating new knowledge by connecting it with existing knowledge.
