Shannon Whitlock
Doctoral Student, Department of English
B.A., English, Auburn University
M.A., English, Auburn University
Phone: 542-1261
Email: scw11@uga.edu
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching a wide array of courses, including first-year composition, business writing, and American literature, has enabled me to engage with a heterogeneous group of students whose needs and motivations vary greatly. It has also encouraged me to think of my classroom as a place where they might confront existing assumptions about reading and writing, primarily that both are simple acts performed in isolation. My primary goal in each of these courses is to show students how analysis and communication have a tremendous impact on their everyday lives, from the way they respond to news articles to the way they craft emails. Because my own love of the language is a manifestation of this awareness, I try to convey my enthusiasm to my students, encouraging them to read critically and write effectively both inside and outside of the classroom.Reading is considered by most to be a fairly straightforward task, one that students have been performing for years and have presumably mastered by the time they arrive on campus. For many students, though, closely reading a text can be an anxiety-producing practice. Confronted with a difficult poem, play, or story, they worry about missing the “meaning” or offering an inaccurate “interpretation.” Part of my responsibility, then, is to provide them with tools of analysis so that the process is more concrete; to remind them that multiple readings can exist simultaneously and still be valid; and to help them appreciate that literature, as Roland Barthes has suggested, “is the question minus the answer.” To facilitate an open exchange of ideas within the classroom, I generally begin class, especially when we’ve read a difficult piece, by asking for short, written responses or dividing them into groups so that they can generate ideas and work through problems before we come together for class discussion. Furthermore, to help students become responsible for their own learning, I ask them to draft prompts for the essay portion of their exams and to create study guides for the class; when they complete these assignments, they know both that their peers will hold them accountable for their work and that they are actively contributing to an existing body of scholarship.
Writing can be just as demanding as reading, especially if students see it as an abstract process that has little bearing on their daily routines and interactions. To combat this sense of disjunction, I reinforce on a regular basis the relevance of good communication and prompt students to consider the audiences for whom they might need to write and the specific goals they might need to achieve. To that end, I often assign a paper in my composition and business writing classes that asks students to investigate the kinds of writing prevalent in their chosen field and the amount of writing they’ll be required to do. After interviewing professionals and looking into job requirements and qualifications, most students discover that good writing skills will have a direct impact on their ability to succeed in their discipline. In my literature classes, I place equal emphasis on writing, demonstrating the ways that literary analysis prepares students for generating, organizing, and supporting arguments.
When I first started teaching, I naively assumed that everyone loved reading and writing as much as I did. I quickly learned, however, that many students dreaded the two, perhaps because they can be time-consuming and challenging, as well as deemed irrelevant by students who see their potential career paths as unrelated. My goal is to show them that while they may not be reading modernist poetry as engineers, accountants, and biologists, they will be writing for diverse communities, engaging with their peers, analyzing various texts, and refining and presenting ideas; thus, my classes are meant to provide the structural underpinnings for their later achievement—no mean responsibility in my eyes.