While my students were diligently completed their Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) feedback forms today, I took photos while walking around the Namm and Library buildings on the fourth floor (afternoon class) and the sixth floor (evening class). Some are mundane, some are technological objects, and some have interesting compositions (to me). Afterwards, I shared my work my students and encouraged them to do the same to build up a personal library of photos that they might want to make use of in their multimodal compositions.
Toward the end of lecture, when I was talking about lessons learned from Hart-Davidson’s essay, which includes being a life-long learner and keeping up-to-date on changing technologies of writing and communication, Prof. Sarah Schmerler, a City Tech English department colleague with a shared interest in Generative AI technologies, stopped by and participated in the class discussion with my students. It was informal and impromptu, but I think my students enjoyed their perspective and lived experience. I enjoyed our conversation during and after class.
I wanted to jot down some of the conversation and additional thoughts spun off from the conversation here:
How can you expect to be a good writer without learning, at least in part, from reading many examples of writing by others?
Writing is reading in reverse. Instead of the words coming into you from the world, you are sending the words out into the world.
Reading and writing go hand-in-hand. Developing skill in one, enriches the other.
Reading heuristics, such as lateral reading and vertical reading, can support getting as much as possible out of one’s reading time, energy, and needs (e.g., is this for a research thesis vs. learning enough about something for a journalistic article).
Our needs–enjoyment, learning, work, etc.–play a key role in what strategies (large scale) and tactics (smaller scale) we employ to accomplish reading goals.
Reading can be a passive exercise, but active reading that engages the text and combines cognition, reasoning, and imagination yields the greatest returns in terms of understanding, analysis, and memory.
Isolation, quiet contemplation, and dedicated time can aid the development of reading and writing.
Teaching writing requires a rethink on how we approach reading and how important reading is to developing writing skill.
Students do lots of different kinds of reading, which we as educators can tap into and help the student connect their reading interests to writing development. Furthermore, it can open doors to other kinds of reading that they were not previously aware of. Knowing where they are and interested can lead to possibilities and knowledge that were around them but unseen. Browsing and finding the neighborhood, in Prof. Schmerler’s terms, connects students to new reading opportunities.
Between the melees, try to find some joy and peace. I’ll be doing that with my Professional and Technical Writing students today. I’ll bring LEGO to class for a bit of educational play that combines the use of their imagination, haptics, educational knowledge, organizational thinking, and writing skill.
They will design a small model that represents something about their specialization (e.g., Biology, Psychology, Computer Science, Fashion Design, etc.) and then write an instruction manual like this example that I made for them based on the model above that I call a “Quiet Reading Corner.” Scroll down to see it deconstruct, which I presented in reverse in my instruction manual.
Yesterday, about twenty faculty and students gathered in BMCC’s Fiterman Hall room 1304 to discuss the effects of Generative AI on college writing, higher education, and society-in-general for the Spring 2025 Robert Lapides Faculty Forum. I was honored to have been invited to participate.
For my part in the conversation, I came at the issue from four vectors: as a science fiction scholar, a writing instructor, a technical communication instructor, and computer hobbyist. My desire to learn how Generative AI works and to pass on what I have learned to my students is informed by my adherence to William Gibson’s axiom, “the street finds its own use for things,” which is coupled with Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and claiming the tools of technology for our own purposes to build the network, community, and world that we want.
While it was scheduled for only two hours, we ran over by 20 minutes–something the organizers said hadn’t happened before. I think that if time hadn’t been called, we might still be there into the wee hours.
The BMCC students in attendance demonstrated their engagement and concern about these technologies in the classroom and their everyday lives.
I closed my comments in response to a question about how we might use Generative AI to fight back against authoritarianism. I offered an assemblage of open source generative AI, a bit of Harlan Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965), and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985).
Besides the substance of the discussion, I think meeting colleagues at BMCC might have opened doors for further work on AI matters and the annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium. Stay tuned!
Below are my presentation notes and bibliographic citations for readings that might be helpful.
General Teaching Portfolio Advice
As with everything in your PARSE and Teaching Portfolio, the key is considering your audience. The audience for these documents are our colleagues across the campus representing very different intellectual disciplines, ways of approaching teaching, and styles for communicating information. Each reader brings different knowledge, expertise, ways of reading, and ways of thinking about teaching. While it’s impossible to accommodate every conceivable possible reader, it pays to address the needs of a general academic audience outside of your field. To do this, unpack concepts, explain the importance of people, theories, or approaches, and use an approachable writing style. If you are unsure or want additional feedback on whether colleagues outside your discipline can get what you are trying to say, ask someone in another department to read an excerpt or section of your portfolio. Avoid dumping your whole portfolio on someone to provide you feedback on unless they have offered to do that for you in advance!
Also, I think it should be said that while it might seem that the work you put into the Teaching Portfolio is a bureaucratic hurdle for promotion, it actually serves a few different important functions. Of course, it is something to check off for your promotion package. However, it’s also a way to reckon with the teaching that you’ve done, the kinds of teaching that you want to do, and how to achieve your ideal teaching in the future. Without it being a requirement, many of us might not take the time to do this necessary professional work that helps us become better educators. Also, it’s valuable for yourself to create a Teaching Portfolio and its individual documents to keep your professional portfolio fresh and up to date. None of us knows what the future holds, but having these documents at the ready help you face change and seek opportunities.
To write an effective Teaching Portfolio, I would suggest reading as many examples as you can given your time and energy. A good starting place is the portfolios of your departmental colleagues who have most recently gone up for promotion successfully. But, you can get lots of good ideas about what to write, how to write it, and how to organize what you write by looking at portfolios from faculty across the college. Reading others’ Teaching Portfolios is what helped me write mine.
Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology
For today, I was asked to talk about two sections of the Teaching Portfolio today: the Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology, which provide your readers with the framework to understand everything that you do in the classroom as an instructor. You can think of the Teaching Philosophy as the “why,” and your Teaching Methodology as the “how.” Another way to think about them is that the Teaching Philosophy is your strategy or the military general’s overarching battle plan, and the Teaching Methodology is your tactics or the smaller actions that added together help you achieve your larger battle plan. While these two documents are separate, they should be in dialog with one another and might even repeat or rephrase some of the same information but in service to the purpose of the respective document. They are simply a reflection of the work that you do in the classroom—your theory of teaching and your praxis of teaching.
Teaching Philosophy
Your Teaching Philosophy is the theoretical underpinning for what you do in the classroom day in and day out. It answers the “because” for each aspect of your teaching.
You can use it to situate yourself in terms of being an educator or in relation to your students at City Tech.
Threaded together, it can include theories of learning, theories of teaching, and theories of assessment and feedback. Show how these work together to facilitate student learning and success.
Rigor in your Teaching Philosophy is an asset, but if you are going to name names or provide quotes, you should explain who those people are, why they are significant, and what they say means in terms of your teaching. This is a part of my Teaching Philosophy that I want to improve on.
Teaching Philosophy Readings
Alexander, Phill, Karissa Chabot, Matt Cox, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Barb Gerber, Staci Perryman-Clark, Julie Platt, Donnie Johnson Sackey, and Mary Wendt. “Teaching with Technology: Remediating the Teaching Philosophy Statement.” Computers and Composition, vol. 29, no. 1, Mar. 2012, pp. 23-38, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2011.12.002.
Eierman, Robert J. “The Teaching Philosophy Statement: Purposes and Organizational Structure.” Journal of Chemical Education, vol. 85, no. 3, Mar. 2008, pp. 336-339, https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ed085p336.
The Teaching Methodology is the list of things that you do in the classroom with students to facilitate learning.
I don’t think there is one right way to write this. Some examples of Teaching Methodologies that I’ve seen focus on discrete activities, which might include the activities’ goals, procedures, and rationalization. Others, like mine, is a mixture of techniques for working with students, providing feedback, and encouraging learning in different ways.
Highlight those techniques of your teaching that you think work best and exemplify yourself as an instructor.
Provide context if a method works better or differently in one class versus another one.
Don’t assume that your reader will understand why or how a particular methodology works for your goals in the classroom. Take the time to provide explanations, discussion, elaborations, and rationalizations.
Review all of your past classes as you brainstorm what you want to include in your methodology. The things that you include do not necessarily have to be big tent activities. There are likely big, medium, and small techniques in your teaching that are worth discussing. Also, the small techniques might yield bigger results than the bigger techniques. If so, include those and explain how.
