Dynamic Subspace

Blog

  • Teaching Portfolio Workshop on Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology, Feb. 9

    anthropomorphic cat professor lecturing in front of a chalkboard with a book under his paws
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    I’m giving a presentation today on the Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Methodology at City Tech’s Teaching Portfolio Workshop. It’s part of a series of events to support faculty who are preparing their portfolios before applying for promotion.

    You can find a copy of my Teaching Portfolio here.

    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.

    Carnegie Mellon University, Student Academic Success Center. Writing Your Teaching Philosophy Statement. CMU, SASC, 2022, https://www.cmu.edu/student-success/other-resources/handouts/comm-supp-pdfs/teaching-philosophy-statement.pdf.

    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.

    University of Michigan, Center for Research on Learning and Teaching. “Teaching Philosophy & Statements.” U-M, CRLT, 2021, https://crlt.umich.edu/resources-publications/teaching-philosophies-statements.

    Teaching Methodology

    • 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.

    Teaching Methodology Readings

    Brookfield, Stephen D. The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. John Wiley & Sons, 2015, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/citytech-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1895929.

    Misseyanni, Anastasia, Miltiadis D. Lytras, Paraskevi Papadopoulou, and Christina Marouli, editors. Active Learning Strategies in Higher Education: Teaching for Leadership, Innovation, and Creativity. Emerald Publishing Ltd., 2018, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/citytech-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5116698.

    University of San Diego. The Complete List of Teaching Methods. USD, 2021, https://onlinedegrees.sandiego.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/USD_Complete-List-of-Teaching-Methods.pdf.

  • Vegetarian With a Kick: Mexican Style Rice and Bean Bowl MRE Menu 14

    brown MRE pouch

    Yesterday, I enjoyed MRE Menu 14: Mexican Style Rice and Bean Bowl from Case B. After teaching one class and spending an hour in the library archives pulling materials for a graduate student from the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, I was ready for some sustenance before teaching my evening class. This MRE hit the spot!

    brown MRE pouch next to its contents in a clear plastic pouch

    Menu 14 includes the following items clockwise from the top left:

    • Carboard Sleeve
    • Mexican Style Rice and Bean Bowl Entree
    • Pretzel Nuggets Honey Mustard & Onion Flavor
    • Crackers
    • Peanut Butter
    • Beverage Pouch
    • Water-activated Heater
    • Spoon
    • Crushed Red Pepper
    • Chocolate Protein Drink Powder
    • First Strike Nutritious Energy Bar Cran-Raspberry Flavor
    • Accessory Packet (Coffee, Creamer, Sugar, Artificial Sweetener, Salt, Moist Towelette, TP)
    plastic and foil pouches of food from an MRE

    I tried the rice and beans before adding the crushed red pepper, and I liked the flavor as is and saved the pepper for later. I didn’t try any of the sides of this MRE, because I also brought some dessert from home. I’ll mix-and-match the sides with other MREs in the future.

    open pouch of MRE entree: rice and beans

  • Canned-Style Comfort Food in MRE Menu 18: Beef Ravioli in Meat Sauce

    Last week, I brought MRE Menu 18: Beef Ravioli in Meat Sauce (from a 3/25 inspection date Case B) to work so that I could have dinner quickly between my first class followed by office hours and then my evening class. I was so hungry that I didn’t take pictures of the contents. Suffice to say that it was tasty and filling, and I saved some of the sweets for later.

    Menu 18 included these items:

    • Cardboard sleeve
    • Beef Ravioli in Meat Sauce entree pack
    • Italian Bread Sticks
    • Cheese Spread
    • M&M’s
    • Water-activated heater
    • Accessory Pack (gum, matches, coffee, sugar, sweetener, creamer, and TP)
    • Carbohydrate Electrolyte Beverage Powder: Fruit Punch
    • Spoon
    • Recovery Bar, Salted Caramel Marshmallow Crisp
    • Tabasco Sauce in Glass Bottle

    The Tabasco Pepper Sauce was the real prize in this MRE. I haven’t received a Tabasco Sauce bottle in years from the many cases that I’ve purchased. Apparently, they had been removed for about a decade before being re-implemented shortly before the MRE case this menu pouch came from was produced. So, I should have some more Tabasco to look forward to as I work my way through this case!

    For my dinner that night, I ate the Italian Break with Cheese Spread and the Ravioli in Meat Sauce. The ravioli remind me of miniaturized Chef Boyardee in a pouch instead of a can. I saved the Recovery Bar for another day–maybe a long hike. I’ve already enjoyed the M&M’s mixed with some peanuts and raisins for trail mix.

    While MREs’ main function is ready nutrition, its morale function via its nostalgic, tasty, and sweet contents can’t be understated.

  • Spring 2025 Semester Begins

    an anthropomorphic tuxedo cat wearing pants, shirt, suspenders, and tie, standing in front of a chalkboard covered in equations
    Image created with Stable Diffusion.

    While Spring 2025 semester classes began this past Saturday at City Tech, my teaching schedule begins today. I’ll be teaching two classes in the Professional and Technical Writing Program: Introduction to Language and Technology (ENG1710) and Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing (ENG2700).

    In Introduction to Language and Technology, I have students read an article (though, we begin with Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling), which they write about in the following class and we discuss it. We work out what we mean exactly when we say “language” and “technology” before looking more closely at how these two aspects of humanity interrelate, interoperate, and influence one another. In parallel to our class discussions, students research and write a paper about one specific technology and its relationship to language. I’ll include a past final exam review below, which will need updating due to some additions to the reading list.

    For Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing, I developed a dual approach that combines theory and praxis as a general welcoming of students to what the field they are entering is like. For each class, students read about the history, work, and deliverables created by technical communicators, which they write about in short in-class assignments and we discuss together. The final readings in the class include one paper about how reading Science Fiction can make you a better technical writer and William Gibson’s “Burning Chrome.” Additionally, students are given short deliverable assignments (e.g., write an email, a letter, a memo, a technical definition, an instruction manual, etc.) each week or so. They receive one grade on these first drafts, and they revise them and write reflections on them for creating a final portfolio, which receives a separate grade.

  • Working on the Millennium Falcon

    droid, man, and a wookie inside a spacecraft making repairs

    While the Millennium Falcon is prone to problems and breakdowns, Han Solo never gives up on her. There’s a lesson there about how we treat and take care of all of our technology.