Dana's Teaching Philosophy

Like many in academia, I was never trained to be a teacher and have had to seek out models and pedagogy, such as those found in McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, to guide my efforts. Because of my subject matter, relying solely on lecture is out of the question. You have to show students how do it, tell them why, let them try and then act as an editor/trouble-shooter to help them finally understand the processes. As such many of efforts have been given over to supplementing the occasional lecture with both class discussion (an art I am still perfecting) and hands on activities. These activities include opportunities to look at the known world through different lenses, such as the Information Organization activity that students complete in a grocery store, as well as chances to get hands on experience with computer programs. One cannot teach people how to do research and package information by simple talking to them about it. And yet learning to package information is not only about learning how to use the software but also learning when to use it.

I find myself in a somewhat ironic situation, an academic who champions the appropriate use of technology. I say “ironic” because in my experience academia usually responds to technology in two ways: they love it and attempt to apply it to every situation; or they hate it and thwart every attempt at introduction. And so, you end up with are those teachers who hide behind their Power Point presentations just as readily as they hid behind their podiums or those who refuse to utilize the wealth of information available electronically because the packaging is not tangible.

Don’t think for a moment, however, that I am without sympathy for both of these groups. Yet the desire to hide nor the frustration with having technology backfire on you when you least expect it, are surely not enough to make a teacher fall short in their calling. And that is what happens when all you get is a bunch of slides or no pictures at all when someone is describing a cathedral window…the teacher fails to teach. I cannot imagine a more frustrating situation for both the teacher and the student.

Indeed, I feel like now, more than ever, the teacher must rely on a rather old fashioned rule to avoid this frustration. THE RULE, if you will, is the first lesson I learned about presentations, and it wasn’t taught to me by my speech teacher but came from my father, a man who worked for years in the business world as an instructor. When I was preparing my first speech for my first speech class, he told me to first “know my audience!”

This rule has resonated with me as I have watched professional speakers turn what surely could have been an interesting or at the very least controversial lecture into painfully boring experiences. Indeed it has haunted me in my own experiences when, while reconstructing the format of my classes, I have lost sight of the objective of student learning while trying to implement a model. Know your audience. It seems so simple and yet in a time when everyone seems to focus on what’s on the projector, knowing your audience is surely the way to make sure that you, at least, remain focused on the right thing, the student.

Teaching requires more than being an expert in your field. To teach is to make what seems difficulty easy. To teach is to remember what is was like before you “knew”. And while we teachers and professors maybe divided according to how many years we’ve taught, what degrees we’ve earned, and what age groups we work with, we are bound by our calling, one that few hear or understand. In this time of budget woes and ever technological changes, it is pertinent that we do not lose sight of our calling. We must, as teachers, know who are audience is so that then we may appropriately utilize these fantastic technologies and finally do what we are here to do.