Part One: Three Shaping Features On Circularity In shape, my teaching philosophy might best be described as circular, and in motion,

centripetal. I have, since reading about it in Parker Palmers Courage to Teach, been inspired by the notion of the teacher as keeper of the great thing in the center of the room, a model Ive adopted for my own use by asking students to circle up in the classroom each day, and by sitting with them in that same circle, our efforts center-seeking. Class time is then spent in reading, thinking, and writing about the theories and texts that most engage our interest and excite our imaginations. While students play an important role in deciding how class time is spent, and as the teacher I am chiefly responsible for negotiating the classroom space, the class isnt about me or about them so much as it is about the great thing were after, together. This model has served me well over the years, and continues to shape itself as I teach and learn. On Passion I have found, in my reading on pedagogy and in my own students evaluations of me as an teacher, that for most students, the single most important quality in an teacher is not knowledge, eloquence, or the ability to entertain (although all of these are important in their own ways), but passion. Most students will forgive their teachers the occasional display of disorganization, unpunctuality, or unpreparedness (although none of these are advisable as behavioral trends), but what they cannot abide is apathy in the classroom. No matter how disinterested a student may be in a topic or field, they can be drawn into fascination with it by a successful teacher, and similarly, no matter how excited about it at the start, can be made to lose interest in it by an ineffective oneand quickly. I think the mistake a lot of teachers make is in focusing on their students faults and their own misgivings about themselves as teachers, when they should be concentrating on the great thing around which they and their studentsmisgivings, faults, and allhave been set revolving, until everything else falls away, insignificant. I try to aspire each day to a passion that shapes and is shaped. On Pleasure A third feature of my philosophy is my belief, along with French theorist Roland Barthes, in the pleasure of the text, a fact that manifests itself in my teaching as a sort of contract I have with each new group of students, that I will make it my mission to convey to them some small measure of the deep satisfaction that can be had in reading and writing, if only they will attempt that experience on their own and for themselves. Far too many students, I have found, undergo the unfortunate experience as children of having literature rent from them, upon entering the educational system, disassociated with familial bonding and personal pleasure, in service of home-work and school-work. As a teacher I stand to argue that while they have been trained to think about work and pleasure as mutually exclusive activities, it is instead the case that the two exist in direct relationship to one another: The more difficult the work, the most fulfilling the resultant pleasure. If, over the course of what I hope will become a lifetime career, I am only able to convince a handful of students of this truth, I will be satisfied with my efforts, and able to rest content. I can think of no nobler or more ambitious mission for myself as a teacher.

Part Two: Two Formative Models On the Johnston Center Model Perhaps the single most formative experience in my pedagogical career was my undergraduate education at the Johnston Center for Integrative Studies, a college within the college of the University of Redlands (a small, private, liberal arts college located in Redlands, California) that seeks to give students greater control over their educations by situating them in the context of a living-learning community, allowing them to work on a contractual basis with their teachers towards an emphasis of their design, and substituting the exchange of narrative evaluations for the distribution of letter grades. The Johnston Center is also one of the few institutions in the country that allows undergraduates to facilitate courses on their own or with a teacher, an opportunity I was able to take advantage of more than once during my time there. In the Johnstonian pedagogy, teaching is a democratic act in which students and faculty members cooperate as co-learners, outside of any hierarchy existing between learned and unlearned. The program is an integrative and interdisciplinary one in which students engage as experts in their various fields to make meaningful connections and draw out complexities. I took away with me from Johnston a devotion to rigor of the highest caliber, an appreciation for the student-as-expert, a belief in classroom democracy, and a faith in the process. On the Writing about Writing Model Formative, too, has been my work with the Writing about Writing syllabus approach, one of eight alternative approaches for teaching First-Year Composition in the Introductory Composition program at Purdue University. Writing about Writing, as an approach, places a heavy emphasis on the meta aspect of the course, one that includes in its scope metaknowledge, meta-languages, and meta-commentary, among others. Students are asked not only to read and write about the art and the act of reading and writing, but to read and write about their own experiences in reading and writing, in a series of assignments that ask them to consider in their composition the topics of literacy, rhetoric, discourse, and linguistics, and that include peer-review and cover memo or reflection components. I have, in my own teaching, taken the Writing about Writing approach a step further, to allow for an ongoing discussion between me and my students about form and content, theory and practice. I have found that when taken together, the two pairings serve as a convenient platform for metacommentary and self-referential or otherwise conceptually abstract conversations. As a poet, my work has often been described as meta-physical, a word that applies to my pedagogy as well. I am interested, both inside and outside of the classroom, in a physical and psychical reality beyond this one, and attempt, in my teaching, to get students to expand their thinking past that of the two-dimensional surface value of the text to that of the text as microcosm of a universe to which they might gain access through imagination and intuition. It is in this attempt that I have made some of my most startling discoveries about teaching.