Elizabeth A.

Boyle
Teaching Philosophy
For many college students, the classroom provides a space to explore newfound
independence and burgeoning identities in ways that will oftentimes guide their future
academic, personal, and professional aspirations. This is especially true for students
encountering introductory composition, an environment in which they encounter a
variety of different disciplinary conventions and writing styles. As an instructor to these
students, my goal is to foster intellectual and personal development; I encourage my
students to hone interpretive techniques that will help them both navigate the
oftentimes difficult path to self-discovery and locate themselves within a unique
academic space. To these ends, students respond to projects that ask them to both
consider their personal relationships in relation to others and examine the larger social
networks in which they participate. Such a local and global focus emphasizes students
roles as not merely passive participants in their societies, but also active contributors
who hold the power to reshape their cultural surroundings.
Making intellectual development and discovery a collective experience, each class
becomes a reciprocal community in which both student and instructor can share,
encourage, and witness one anothers personal and professional transformations. In
accordance with these goals, I encourage students through formal projects, class
discussion, and informal writing assignments to consider their positions as burgeoning
intellectuals within their university. One assignment, for instance, asks students to
consider how their respective university department and/or academic discipline defines
its individual scholarly purpose. Through this work, students begin to recognize their
positions in the university as well as in the broader social and cultural networks that
shape their public personas. Doing so enables students to not only invest themselves
in their work, but also envision how they will be able to transmit the skills they develop
in my class to their future scholastic and professional endeavors.
Knowing that many of my students go on to pursue careers in science, mathematics,
and engineering fields, I structure my classroom to help students develop the skills
they will need to operate in their respective disciplines. This means not only creating
assignments that students can interpret or tailor to meet their own needs, but also
guiding students discovery of discourse-specific rhetorical and interpretive techniques
they may require in the future. Such an approach ensures students commitment to the
work they do in the course and creates cohesion within the students undergraduate
and pre-professional experience.
Ultimately, my goal as an instructor is not only to provide students with skills that they
can apply to succeed in my courses, but also skills that they can transfer to succeed in

their futures. Encouraging students awareness of other writers techniques helps them
better understand and control their own rhetorical decisions, a skill that they will
practice regardless of the field they enter. At the same time, asking students to
consider their identities in relation to the society they inhabit helps configure their roles
as world citizens. By placing students intellectual adaptability at the forefront of my
pedagogical philosophy, I am able to develop a curriculum that promotes students
confidence in their writing and encourages them to assume an authority over their work
that will be invaluable in their future academic and professional pursuits.