Tabetha Adkins

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy originates from my own best learning experiences when teachers made
me feel as though my prose was compelling. These teachers demystified composing and showed
me that writing, to borrow Peter Elbow’s words, has power. I take these experiences into the
classroom with me, and as a result, my teaching is guided by the same overarching philosophies:
students can best learn to write when they think and feel like writers, students are full of
experiences and ideas worthy of contributing to arguments, and writing is a mode through which
writers both make arguments and ask questions.

In my research and first-year writing courses, I accomplish my goal for students to learn to think
and feel like writers by two means. First, because I see my classroom as a community of writers,
I borrow from my writing center experience and scholars like John Trimbur and Ken Bruffee and
create opportunities for students to talk about their writing in class and have their writing talked
about by other student writers. To this end, I often use students’ writing as a resource in the
classroom, and I allot a significant amount of time each semester to full-class workshops. This
exercise not only helps students to visualize their audience but also develops students’ abilities to
speak about writing using rhetorical terminology such as pathos, ethos, and logos. Another way I
help students to think and feel like writers is through creating assignments like those advocated
by scholars like Wendy Bishop, Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, and Bonnie Sunstein in which students
conduct field work, archival research, or empirical studies. These methods, after all, are often
the source of scholarship by professional writers or academics, and students feel more inclined to
assume the voice of an expert when they have participated in the creation of their sources.
Students have responded to these assignments with a variety of inventive projects, including an
ethnographic report of a meeting of The Religious Society of Friends, a study of the literacy
practices of a tattoo parlor sub-culture, and the history of a course at the University of Louisville.

Because I acknowledge that writers and readers interact with many different kinds of texts,
following in the tradition of scholars like Cynthia Selfe and Gail Hawisher, I take advantage of
the advances in digital resources available to writers by assigning one high-stakes assignment
each semester that requires students to compose in a mode other than that of traditional written
texts. Students in my women’s studies class, for example, created a sequence of audio essays
modeled after the National Public Radio series “This I Believe.” This assignment allowed
students not only to compose with a new technology but also to use their own experience and
knowledge while illustrating they have learned the content of the course. Students were proud of
this work and were anxious to share these essays with friends and family. Some students even
contributed their essays to our campus’s “Take Back the Night” campaign. This assignment
made students’ writing tangible, important, and pertinent to their own lives.

When teaching literature courses, I help students understand what literary analysis is and what
literary critics do when they write about literature. I aim to help students understand that authors
do not write in a vacuum, and as a result, literature is inspired and affected by the social worlds
of authors. I encourage them to depend not only on other texts but also on their own social world
to inform their readings of literature. This practice allows students to feel more like experts
 T. Adkins Teaching Philosophy 2

when they talk about literature in class and to understand how literary critics create interesting
interpretations. My pedagogy in literature courses is informed by the principals that inform all of
my teaching: the best writing comes from students who believe they have ideas worthy of
writing about and writing can be used for both making arguments and asking questions.

Writing as a vehicle for asking questions is the basis of the pedagogy course I co-teach with the
director of the composition program. All composition teachers at the University of Louisville
are required to take this graduate-level course; therefore, the students in this class are typically
first-time teachers who are asking questions about how to teach, how their experiences as
students can translate into their own teaching, and how successful teachers learn to teach. The
writing in this course requires students to ask questions about the classroom practices they
observe while also considering the theoretical context informing these practices. I present new
teachers with both composition theory and practical nuts-and-bolts strategies. This course, then,
becomes almost entirely about questions, and as a result, we spend a significant amount of time
writing through these questions.

Each semester, I begin each class, regardless of the subject, with the same statement: “This class
is about writing.” Whether the course focuses on research writing, business writing, writing
about literature, or writing to evoke or respond to social change, the importance and power of
writing is at the center of my courses. My ultimate goal is for students to feel empowered to
employ writing with confidence wherever their education takes them.