Danny Alexander’s Teaching Philosophy
I tell my students a few things over and over—“I got through school by relating everything to my record collection,” “I learn more from my students than they learn from me” and when I finally met one of my favorite writers, one of the most valuable things he said about my work was, “What in hell does that paragraph on page 11 mean that couldn’t be said in half the space without all the academic gobbledygook?”
I got a million, and most of them are just as self-deprecating. But I don’t think that common denominator is about false humility. I think it’s about being honest about my limits and my strengths. My 33 years in front of a classroom (30 at Johnson County Community College) have involved a lot of stripping away what didn’t ring true. The reality left behind is often messy—it involves relating ideas to thousands of different pieces of our own lives, it means we get as much out of class as we put into it (myself included), and it means we will make mistakes—over and over and over again. The trick is to learn something from them and still find a way to move forward.
I pretty much hated school K-12, which I see differently today because I have been married to a teacher who does that work. But the process of top-down social engineering, warehousing and standardization that typified my years before college felt like a lot of lies disconnected from reality, and my instinct was to rebel against it. I think my discomfort with the pedantic part of the job helps me connect with some students who also have issues with the classroom environment, even as it makes some other students a little more uneasy. I think both responses can be good. One of my primary goals is to encourage critical thinking about every aspect of the class. I try to convey to my students that they will generalize what they learn more effectively if they maintain a healthy level of skepticism and sort their own way through the logic of the class work.
I enjoyed college because I finally felt I was being treated as an adult. So when an educational theorist like Paolo Freire recasts “student-centered” as an awareness of the student’s need for dignity and liberation, I get that. That’s exactly what all serious education has meant for me. For similar reasons, I’m a great fan of Daniel Wolff’s book How Lincoln Learned to Read, which gives a history of America through twenty chronologically end-to-end biographies of how influential Americans gained their education. It illustrates twenty different learning styles, and it drives home at least one common denominator—students need to be in charge of their learning.
And the ability to let students take charge of what they want to learn is a big part of why I love teaching writing. I set goals in terms of a variety of skills to be developed and standards to be met, but the students set much of their own curriculum. When it’s working well, I think my writing classroom takes the form of a community that fosters a variety of different strengths. That community can push all of the students to explore ideas in depth and deliver their findings with emphasis and precision.
While my composition classes emphasize JCCC’s first three desired learning outcomes, my literature courses better emphasize Student Learning Outcome #4—“Demonstrate an understanding of the broad diversity of the human experience and the individual’s connection to society.” We roundtable discuss the personal, artistic and historic significance of a variety of literature. Though we learn to apply common tools for accomplishing these tasks, the most memorable impact inevitably comes from the students’ own passions, their effort and, yes, their mistakes.
Of course, I have some level of expertise in my subject, but I think the most important thing I may model for my students is my ability to ask for help. I expect the class to help make it work. The carrot at the end of my stick is that this particular group of people will never be in this place again with these opportunities on the table. I want it to go well, and for the most part, they do, too. If I can get them to see that logic, then everything else falls into place.
Professional Goals:
1) My most important goal each semester is to become a better teacher in the day-to-day sense, and that means I need to do a better job drawing boundaries as well as keeping my head and finding the potential in each curve ball thrown my way in the classroom. By mid-semester, I feel I begin to lose perspective, and I want to carve out more time for both preparation and reflection so that I can be more effective in the classroom.
2) My biggest concern with the composition classroom is the way we address Student Learning Outcome #2, “Collaborating Respectfully with Others,” specifically in terms of peer review. I emphasize that our course is as much about being a good editor as a good writer, and the peer groups start off strong, but most of them lose energy and focus as the semester goes on. I’d like to do more research on methods that work and try some different tactics in upcoming semesters.
3) I need to do more to address Student Learning Outcome #8, “Use Technology Efficiently and Responsibly.” I have a love/hate relationship with technology in the classroom because I believe that there’s so much emphasis on social networking technologies today that the ability to work face-to-face becomes all the more precious. Still, I have found Canvas to be useful in terms of both the gradebook and various ways I keep students updated and reminded of course priorities.
4) I need to plan ahead to take better advantage of professional development opportunities. I miss campus opportunities all the time because I haven’t planned far enough in advance, and once my semester gets rolling, it’s very difficult for me to create new space. This is a corollary to Goal #1 above.
5) I continuously work on synthesizing the work that I do. I’m a relatively accomplished writer outside academia, having published hundreds of reviews, profiles and think pieces in a variety of publications over the past 25 years. I have written two books and contributed to half a dozen others. My most recent book is a critical appreciation of musician Mary J. Blige published by The University of Texas Press in March 2016. Anecdotally and otherwise, I frequently refer to lessons from my writing in the classroom, but I don’t do much in a formal sense. Toward this end, I did co-write the course The Literature of American Popular Music, but our struggles with filling literature courses has hit this offering particularly hard. In 2015, I taught the Honors Program Forum focused on popular music and social movements. I would like to use my work in a more systematic way both in the classroom and as a way to promote our program off campus and throughout the academic community. One tentative plan in this direction is my intent to present at the most prestigious conference in my writing field, the Experience Music Project Pop Conference in Seattle, Spring 2018.
6) I have been an advisor to various student groups such as Latinos United and the Black Student Union, but I have moved to an informal relationship with both organizations. That said, I would like to maintain my engagement with these students.
7) I long supported the Read Your Creative Writing events in the Commons, and I would like to participate in future such events on campus.
8) The future of the Joint Workload Committee is in question while our contract remains unsettled, but I would like to continue to address workload issues for English faculty.