Teaching Philosophy
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Anita M. DeRouen
As a teacher and scholar of literature, I find my greatest joy in watching students develop skill and competency in their own reading skills and awareness. I love opening minds, not to fill them with my ideas about what texts mean or how they should be read, but to encourage students to devise their own opinions and ideas. This desire is reflected in my own literary interests, my critical interest in poets like William Blake and W. B. Yeats, who wanted to develop their own philosophical systems, a testament to the beauty that may be achieved by an active mind seeking to understand and assimilate experience, knowledge, and action in to their own matrices.

In my classroom, I try to awaken minds by encouraging discussion, questions, performance, imagination, and, most importantly, good reading and writing skills. Reading far too often takes a backseat in this discipline, our assumption being that our students are already good readers and don’t need further improvements in this area. My experiences have taught me otherwise, and I make it a point to focus some time at the beginning of every semester working with students to better their own reading skills. Active, engaged readers think more deeply about the texts they read, begin the critical assessment process aware of their own interests in and connections with a text, and will, therefore, write more complex textual discussions.

To assist in this awakening, I employ both traditional and technological tools. One of my most effective lesson groups in the first year composition program is the section on poetry explication. The language of poetry is so highly structured, groomed, and condensed, that learning to read it effectively provides a great training ground for other types of literature. My students use an XML-based text editor, <emma>™, to first comment on various elements in poetic texts, then to write a more detailed and thorough explication of a poem. I often find that my students who hate reading poetry develop a better appreciation once they see how all of the pieces come together to create what initially appears to be an easily understood whole. An ancillary assignment is to take one of the poems from an exercise and write a response to it, using the same formal qualities and constraints, a project that generates interesting poems and students who appreciate the use of form.

I will continue to focus on the reading ability of my students, regardless of the actual site of reading. The <emma>™ program faciliatates this focus by capturing a student’s reading reactions and responses; students can write alongside the author, inserting their comments, questions, reactions, and responses as they read. My current research investigates the nature of those textual interventions to see how students make meaning and connections with the poetic texts they read.
derouen@uga.edu