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Silas C.

Hansen

Teaching Philosophy

As a writing teacher, my primary responsibility is to help my students figure out what
stories they need to tell, and how to tell them. Whether I am teaching a first-year writing
course or an upper-division creative nonfiction workshop, I focus on helping my students
learn to think critically about their experiences and the information they consume,
understand both the rhetorical and artistic effectiveness of various craft techniques, and
gain the skills necessary to apply the feedback they receive to become better writers.

In order to teach critical thinking skills, and to make my classroom a welcoming place for
all students, I make every effort to include readings that discuss diverse experiences and
identities. In rhetoric and composition courses, I make rhetorical analysis relevant to
their lives by choosing topics that will be interesting and useful to them. I often utilize
music videos, clips from television shows and movies, excerpts from popular literature,
and advertisements targeting college students to demonstrate how their rhetorical analysis
skills can be put into practice in everyday life. We break these sources into their
component parts to talk about implicit and explicit meaning, audience, and the rhetorical
choices an author is making. In creative writing courses, I assign a great deal of reading,
providing a survey of the various subgenres and the craft techniques and concerns of each
one. In creative nonfiction, this includes discussions of lyric essays, memoir, literary
journalism, and personal essays; in fiction and poetry, this means looking at both the
traditional and the experimental. While I want my students to have a foundational
understanding of literatureand therefore assign sample essays, stories, and poems from
the cannonI also want them to read widely and to learn how to have conversations
about experiences and values that are drastically different from their own. I make every
effort to include work by a diverse group of writers and to not shy away from the difficult
questions my students sometimes raise. In these discussions, I draw on my practical
experience and theoretical knowledge of student development to better facilitate
productive conversations, which students find useful; in end-of-the-semester evaluations,
students have consistently said that they were grateful to have been taken outside of their
comfort zones, as it had improved their writing and thinking skills and encouraged them
to grow.

I am also dedicated to teaching my students the rhetorical and creative foundations for
successful communication. We carefully study examples of the kinds of writing I ask
them to compose, asking questions about genre conventions, rhetorical strategy, and
literary craft in order to understand how the writer succeedsor failsand what we can
take away from the piece. These conversations also serve as a foundation for peer review
workshops later in the term by modeling the kinds of questions students should be asking
about each others work. In creative writing courses, I require my students to practice
these techniques and to consider incorporating them into their own writing projects.
While they are free to write what they wishas long as it fits with the focus of the
courseand I make every effort to respect my students artistic vision for their work, I
also want them to have the foundational skills, should they need them. I want my
students to leave my class with the ability to make strategic choices about the kinds of
craft techniques they employ in a piece of writing; for example, making the choice to
include exposition on page 7 because thats what the piece calls for, and not because they
are uncomfortable writing scenes. Similarly, I want my composition students to leave my
class with an understanding of more than one kind of writing; while the primary focus is
on academic writing, I also know that this genre might only benefit most of my
studentssince they will enter the private sector, rather than academiafor the next
three or four years. I therefore take every opportunity to expose them to the conventions
of other types of writing that might be useful by including short writing exercises at the
beginning of each class, using social media and blogs to talk about rhetoric, and including
a public writing assignment at the end of each semester.

Once students have a greater understanding of how to have productive conversations, and
the craft techniques for successful writing, I encourage them to practice giving and
receiving feedback on their writing through one-on-one conferences with me, peer review
workshops, and other activities. Drawing on my experiences working in a university
writing center, I strive not to be too directive with my feedback. Instead, I have
conversations with my students about what choices they made and whether or not they
were effective. We spend time in these conferences talking about their individual
strengths as writers, and where they might need to work harder; I also dedicate time to
talking about the kinds of questions they might want to ask about their writing so they
know how to ask for the help they need once they leave my class. Once we begin peer
review workshops, I try to step back and act more as a facilitator. While I am not shy
about jumping in to direct conversation if it gets off-track, or if I think a certain piece of
feedback might be harmful to a students growth as a writer, I want my students to be
active participants and to articulate the knowledge they have acquired. In end-of-
semester evaluations, students have consistently said that I did a terrific job facilitating
workshops and discussions, had a real understanding of how to moderate class
discussion, facilitated a positive environment for our workshops, and [taught]
students how to critique in an effective and respectful way.

Finally, I strive to cultivate an appreciation for feedback and critique in my students by
helping them see writing as a process through which they can become more effective
communicators. I want my students to understand that they can improve, regardless of
their current performance, if they work hard and practice their craft.

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