“If you’ve taught, you have a teaching philosophy, you might just not know it yet!” It was comforting to hear DeVoss et. al. explain why this is not necessarily the case, as they echo my experience as a first-year teacher without much formal training. I felt like I was on survival mode, planning just enough to get through the next day, making last-minute decisions with limited information and conviction, and then reacting to events as they happened. Of course I had ideas and beliefs that influenced my practice, but I certainly did not have a “well-defined, illustratable … system or identifiable method that guides approaches”. As DeVoss et. al. point out, “a set of beliefs and practices … without a guiding anchor … might just remain a haphazard collection of beliefs and practices” (27).
Thus, I am glad that this class pushed me to articulate my pedagogical goals and beliefs in a teaching philosophy statement. I am also glad for the mandatory drafting process and upcoming remediated versions, because such a statement is indeed a “living document”. For example, my draft had been divided into three sections: context, overall pedagogical goals, and incorporating technology. I eliminated these headings in my final, instead reorganizing and consolidating the sections. While my beliefs and practices are grounded in the context of my current school, I want my guiding philosophy to remain flexible and somewhat generalizable. I also do not want to distinguish between ‘traditional teaching’ and ‘teaching with technology’; I want technology to be integrated naturally and effectively into my practice. Finally and most importantly, I included a clear, concise, overarching idea that could serve as my “guiding anchor”.
In revising my (alphabetical) draft for my (alphabetical) final, I not only focused on how to improve my writing, I reflected more deeply upon my pedagogical values and reconsidered how best to express them in the given mode. I am sure that this process will only intensify as we begin to remediate our “teachology” statements. I had been thinking about the definition(s) of and wordplay in the term “remediate”, so it was interesting to read DeVoss et. al.’s explanation of it. Citing Bolter and Grusin, they write, “Remediation works both as re-media-tion, or the act of drawing upon other media sources in a range of ways, and remedying, or the act of addressing lacks or gaps in earlier media” (30). Remediation is not just transferring ideas from one mode to another; it requires a process of creativity and rethinking. It “calls upon composers to reflect, resituate, and reshape a piece while moving it to another medium, and often to enhance or expand upon its existing meaning”, DeVoss et. al. state (30). Thus, even though I am not sure yet how I will express my teaching philosophy in an infographic or video, I am looking forward to the creative and reflective challenges that will pose.