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Ryan Jenkins
EDUC 5423
October 12th, 2016

Teaching Philosophy
As a young student moving through a changing school system, I have often stated that I
had felt disinterested in my classes until I had reached high school. This was not of course,
because of any kind of disinterest in the subject matter, in fact I spent much of my childhood
reading, creative writing, and creating art. My personal neutrality towards the school system
arose from the fact that, in hindsight, it was very clear that the teachers I had were directing their
classes and their attention towards a middle, an ideal of what the normal student should be.
This is a teaching method which is now, of course, greatly discouraged, but for the late 90s and
early 00s was a fairly common practice. There was very little differentiation in regards to
different types of learners, let alone those with varying exceptionalities, in any of the lesson
plans that I remember from that time in my life and I feel that the disconnect I was feeling
between my own interests and what I was doing in school can be attributed to this. As I ready
myself for my career as a teacher I cant help but feel that my drive to create open and
functionally differentiated classrooms stem from this experience.

Speaking as an individual, my passions are very much centered around creation. Be it

writing-recording-or-performing music, audio engineering, photography, videography, graphic
design, creative writing, or just blowing off some steam in a sketchbook or on a canvas the
majority of my life outside of school is centered around creating something from nothing. Taking
the abstract and the difficult and giving it tangible, corporeal form. This is one of the many
reasons that I was drawn to education, and Language Arts in general, in the first place. It is also
something that I plan to integrate into my teaching to help promote a creative, inclusive, and
differentiated community in my English Language Arts classroom. I want students to feel that
the environment created in my classrooms are safe and indusive to inquiry based learning.

As Rawia Hayik points out in their article, What does this Story say about Females there
is a desperate lack of strong female characters in classic or cannon literature. In many novels the
female characters are placed into passive or Cinderella roles that fail to properly represent an
entire half of the earth's population. This is a huge issue in the L.A. classroom that I feel has
been overlooked all too often in the past. This goes equally for any gender identity, skin colour,
ethnicity, or other differentiation from the perceived norm. When it comes to the books that L.A.
teachers put into their units and lessons, it is a rare occurrence to see a character be properly
represented that doesn't fit into that perceived norm.
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I would like to tackle this by implementing texts that properly represent all minority
groups as honestly as possible. I would like to bring in works like traditional indigenous stories,
or novels written by and about the LGBTQ+ community, so that students can understand and
respect all forms of literature. How is a student supposed to take an active interest in English
L.A. if it is impossible for them to see themselves in the stories we are telling them are
important? I plan to create an inclusive and multi-representational collection of literature that
will come together to create a gender (and otherwise affiliated) inclusive curriculum that
promotes critical thinking in regards to the power that language holds to shape the way we
perceive ourselves.

In conjunction with the diverse collection of literature I plan to implement in my

classroom I think it is also distinctly important that I make the literature I cover as multi-genre as
possible. It is an error of the educators that refuse to acknowledge that literature has evolved past
the pages of books that has caused so many youth to fall out of love with reading. By demanding
every student sit and read the same book at the same time regardless of reading ability or interest
is a surefire way to ensure that most of your class is having a poor reading experience. By
opening your classroom up to other forms of storytelling; like audiobooks, podcasts, art, movies,
slam poetry, and music, you are ensuring that every student will find a way to interact with
literature in some way inside our classroom. As well as this, you will also be validating your
students interests and preferred way of experiencing literature and sparking a deeper interest in
English Language Arts. Any creative students will begin to see that the L.A. classroom is a rich
environment in which they are safe to create within and any hesitant readers can find comfort in
familiar and exciting mediums which will lead them on a path of deeper interaction with
literature.

In regards to the actual work I will expect of my students, I plan to offer as many
opportunities for creative and practical implementation of the skills that will be taught in my
classroom. There are a great deal of ways that I hope to achieve this. For instance, as pointed out
in the article Inverting Instruction in Literacy Methods Courses, implementing an inverted
classroom structure, in which the concepts of the class are assigned as homework and class time
is spent applying, synthesising, and personalizing that information, can prove to be an extremely
effective teaching tool when focusing on a real depth of understanding. Though this may not be
the best structure for every unit or topic, It is a useful teaching tool that I plan to implement to
aid students in developing the sophistication of their ideas and to ensure that there is a depth of
engagement with these ideas and the topics at hand.

I want my classes to be a place where not only my own passions, but the passions of my
students have a safe and inclusive environment to shine. Creativity will always be a part of
everything I do inside and outside the classroom and I believe that it is important that every
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student has been given the tools necessary to take advantage of the opportunity to be creative as
well. To simply teach to the middle and tack on a few inclusionary options at the end of a unit is
not enough for me. Every student should feel included. Every student should be represented.
Every student should be facilitated with the tools they need to succeed. English is one of the
purest forms to recorded human thought and to take that and turn it into something inaccessible
to our students is a disservice to the authors of the past and the future.
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Work Cited

Hayik, Rawia. "What Does This Story Say About Females?" Journal of Adolescent and Adult
Literacy 59.4 (2016): 409-19. Web.

Zawilinski, Lisa M., Kimberly A. Richard, and Laurie A. Henry. "Inverting Instruction in
Literacy Methods Courses Making Learning More Active and Personalized." Journal of
Adolescent and Adult Literacy 59.6 (2016): 695-708. Web.