When teaching my composition and literature classes, I encourage students to view texts as cultural fragments that are constantly under revision and as artifacts that reveal clues about the time period we are studying. Our students’ lives are constructed of verbal and visual fragments. From these texts, they fashion their views of the world and their ambitions for the future. My composition students analyze Facebook chats, emails, blog posts, tweets, film clips, and Youtube videos, as well as more traditional forms of communication. When reading early modern plays, students in my upper-level Shakespeare class learn that early modern actors also worked with fragments, such as actors’ parts, songs, props, and backstage plots. I strive to help students connect prose and verse to the texts’ cultural framework, whether we are discussing a contemporary comedian’s tweets or actors’ parts from the early modern period, so that they realize that studying individuals’ and groups’ composition processes enables us all to express our thoughts in the most effective, persuasive manner in any medium or setting.
My fascination with communication and revision stems from my professional experience as well as my personal interests. While I always have loved literature and writing, I did not always want to be a teacher. For several years, I happily worked in a large, successful advertising agency with creative, versatile co-workers and clients. Yet I realized that I wanted to focus more on the parts of my job that I loved the most: training, research, and writing. As an amateur actor and a voracious reader, I desired a career that encouraged artistic expression and analysis. More importantly, I wished to share my passion for literature with others. Through teaching, I help students discover that plays are living, breathing performances that constantly change and that well-crafted prose and poetry consist of revised thoughts that do not spring forth fully formed.
In my classes, I work hard to create an open, friendly environment where students can converse as professionals because I feel that building individual confidence and cultivating a classroom community are primary concerns in college as well as in the workforce. While I urge my students to embrace their individual interests and backgrounds, I also encourage them to view research and writing as collaboration. In my composition classes, for example, students work in research groups to study a particular company’s rhetorical strategies, analyzing websites, commercials, and advertising to determine how that company persuades consumers to purchase a particular product. I also incorporate collaboration in my literature classes, asking student groups to adapt a playwright’s scene and perform or film their adaptation for the class.
To create a positive, dynamic educational environment, I believe that a teacher needs to incorporate the class’s interests in designing course projects so that her students can study and write about what inspires them. The students I teach have dreams that are different than mine— many want to be lawyers, doctors, artists, or entrepreneurs. In my upper-level Shakespeare class, students who want to be teachers design educational websites for middle school students, whereas students who want to be psychologists or artists research images of Ophelia to analyze shifts in cultural attitudes towards melancholy and love. Aspiring musicians in my composition classes research the history of music censorship or analyze studies that describe the effects of music therapy. When conferencing with my students about their writing, I try to support their discoveries and arguments instead of leading them to what I think is the “right” approach or opinion. Above all, as a teacher, I hope to inspire students to be passionate about the variety of texts that they will study and create in their courses, careers, and lives.
Allison Kellar 