Jess Pauszek

Teaching Philosophy

When I think of what I value in my own pedagogy, I focus on the idea that writing is a mode of engagement with the world around usboth inside and outside of the university. To be sure, this engagement can take on multiple forms, but being responsive to our communities is about recognizing the multiple literacies, languages, and positionalities that each of us bring to our writing experiences. As a teacher, I want to collapse the boundaries of in and out of school literacies and enable students to see their various identities (gendered, raced, classed, generational, linguistic, etc.) as informing their writing. My hope with this is to emphasize that our personal histories inform our social histories. In doing this, we must broaden our understandings of what it means to be a public intellectual and active citizen responsible to the both university we attend and the communities we inhabit. My goal as a teacher is to make this apparent not only in theory but also in practicespecifically by connecting public and social issues with our curriculum choices and outreach initiatives aimed at literacy and writing development. I see community-based endeavors as the impetus for my pedagogical philosophy as they cross disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. While I use the term community-based, others may name this something different; regardless of terminology choices, I mean for it to be a call for students and myself to critically examine our places within the larger societal constructions of both the university and its surroundingsto see the personal as constantly being formed and mediated by the social. Drawing off of the scholarship of Paula Mathieu, Ellen Cushman and Nancy Welch who argue for communitybased writing projects, I see composition courses as an opportunity to explore how writing is shaped by and circulated through multiple communities with various effects. In effect, I want students to think through the production of writing. This can take on many forms in classes, including oral histories, personal narratives, interviews, reflective pieces, digital literacy narratives, etc. For example, as a masters student, I co-taught a writing course at Northeastern University entitled Writing Boston which was paired with a non-profit literacy organization 826 Boston. In addition to tutoring 6-8th grade students once a week at a local middle school, our undergraduate students were asked to do their own writing about community. They chose a site where they had to do first hand observations to better understand how writing (as a verb and a noun) functions within that space. It could be at a community site, an on-line forum (connected to the community), a local coffee shop, etc. The goal here was to enable students to develop rhetorical awareness of their surroundings as well with multiple modalities and literacy. This work also has potentially fruitful and transferrable skills that can extend beyond the class. Indeed, the anticipated outcomes of a community-based curriculum can include that students identify a local societal issue and create a way to engage with this issue through writing. To do this, they are asked to understand the key stakeholders involved in this issue and produce textual products intended for multiple institutional and community audiences. Within this writing, students must make rhetorical choices that exemplify the various audiences, such as blending genres, multimodalities, literacies, languages, etc.

Various teaching experiences have required me to consciously consider the privileges afforded or denied by my various positionalities as someone invested in community partnerships and community literacy. In recent years, Ive worked with a nonprofit organization for adolescent literacy, co-taught a service-learning summer course for high school students through Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, and taught ESL students for a summer at Phillips Academy Andover. More recently, Ive worked to form a writing group for 8-13 year olds in the Westside of Syracuse. I see these opportunities as complementary to my college level teaching because they have given me the space to think through whats at stake with writing and literacy in our school systems. Perhaps this was most apparent when the 6th grade student I was tutoring told me she had been homeless for the past year but now things were good and she even gets to talk about the experience at local colleges. Less than one mile from the private university where us tutors came from, this girl was lucky to have made it through a year of school while being homeless. My job of teaching writing suddenly shifted, in a need to make my college students more aware of the community that we were so easily able to ignore from campus walls. Indeed, positionality is particularly important to me, as my work has involved a variety of age groups, and I draw inspiration from feminist methods in the scholarship of Krista Ratcliffe, Eileen Schell and Wendy Hesford. These methods have given me a way to have students examine their own place in the world and situate themselves as part of a network where material realities and lived experiences affect our writing. I believe that understanding both the local and global impacts of writing and literacy is important as we continue to see ourselves as citizens responsible to the communities around us. Indeed, community engagement is my praxis, in which theory is embodied in hopes of blurring the boundaries between the academy and community. Central to this idea is that communities are neither stable nor homogenous, rather constantly changing and contingent. Rather, communities construct themselves (and are constructed) though rhetoric with our identification with the people around us. My goal as a teacher is to actively engage in this endeavor by discovering new ways of being responsive to the multiple communities around us.