An English Teacher’s Philosophy

“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.” – Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Three years ago I sat in an education class at Clark University and read a chapter from a book by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. I did not understand much of his philosophy at the time, but I did perk up during our class discussion on Freire’s idea of learning to “read the world.” It just made sense. After all, we are reading every moment, whether we realize it or not. When we learn to read works of literature, for instance, we also practice learning to “read” the world; that is, we begin to make meaning from our surroundings based on our interpretations, as we might do while reading a book. I have realized that my passions for teaching English all revolve around the concept of learning to read the world.

In learning to read the world, students must be able to express and question their beliefs. For one, we all encounter people with whom we disagree, but reading these people’s disagreements allows us to step back to make constructive choices about how to address a situation or comment. We must examine all of the available evidence and objectively make inferences and conclusions. I want my students to examine their perspective—in addition to someone else’s—to work toward a solution. This examination is one way we read the world, and we can see a microcosm of this in good literature. Students can grapple with characters’ decisions and choices, and they can also build empathy through the perspective of the characters. In my classroom, we often engage in whole-class dialogues to build careful speaking and listening skills, always emphasizing building off the comments of others. I often pose to students “How?” and “Why?” and “Say more,” in an attempt to get them to think more deeply, examine their ideas, and back up their thoughts with evidence from the text, their lives, or both.

Students must learn to write and speak about (express) their world, as well as to listen to and read about (perceive) their world. This also involves entering into worlds with which they may have not had experience with in their lives. Moreover, their world is one degree of the world; it is my personal philosophy that we must find ways to understand and express our individual world before we can move into examining and reflecting on everything else. In English, this means that we are making our own interpretations about texts and being open to the many other interpretations made by those around us. Thus, in my classroom, we use Socratic seminars, acting activities like tea parties and hot seats, and character journaling to empathize with characters, find evidence, and work through universal problems in order to engage themes.

In my English class, we must take academic and creative risks; we must embrace that our reading of the world might benefit from hearing others’ opinions. Thus, reading the world means we all must learn to take risks. In our lives, we will be forced to act in ways that make us uncomfortable, whether we are scheduling a doctor’s appointment or purchasing a home. Sometimes, the best way to learn is by stepping into a zone of discomfort, where failure is a sacred degree of learning. Just like I strive to be a reflective teacher, I hope my students will also reflect on their learning moments and grow from them. They should understand that their reading of the world might change; in fact, it should change and should constantly be undergoing reevaluation. We will welcome and encourage the English classroom as a space to try out views and debate consciously, passionately, and respectfully. In my class, this takes the form of various levels of dialogue, beginning with low-stakes partner work and working toward sharing at a whole-class level. Through activities such as peer revising work and in-class draft writing, we learn that the writing process requires mistakes and communication with a community of writers. Writing is not an individual task in my classroom; rather, it is something we build together.

Reading the world often involves going places that we had not intended to visit. Rather than call these moments “misinterpretations,” I prefer to think of them as allowing us to become “experienced thinkers.” Thus, students’ putting forth effort will be vital to my English classroom environment. To read the world is to engage with the world and see it for what it is to each of us and all of us. We may not receive what we had initially intended, but we will always learn something about our reading of the world.