Dr. Jason Lawton Winslade – Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching has continually evolved over my eighteen years of experience of teaching at the undergraduate level. My main approach utilizes the quite obvious observation that students will commit more deeply to their work if they feel that they can play an active role in their learning, and that their voices are heard and valued. In my composition and rhetoric courses, this often translates to a communication process between individual students and myself about what topics will work best for their writing projects. Within a bounded range of assignments, we discuss what topics would best suit their needs and interests, and I help them delimit and hone their topic so they can write with a strong personal commitment. As an interdisciplinary scholar, I encourage students to see their topics of interest as part of a broader discourse or set of competing discourses, in which various disciplines and schools of thought are in a constant conversation that they are joining. In all my courses, I challenge students to critique and contribute to an ongoing discourse that encompasses their topics.

     An integral part of this process involves constant reflection on the work and students must engage in that reflection through various methods of journaling, free writing, and commentary on their own and others’ work. I ask students to provide commentary after their draft is complete to prepare for a peer review process, which involves both formal and informal discussions of their own and other student’s writing. This process also requires an attention to the recursive nature of writing, through several stages of revision. My classes demand that students respond and evaluate texts in a variety of genres and media, locating the texts they read and the papers they write within social and cultural contexts, and understand the relationships among language, knowledge, and power. My students must master several rhetorical skills, including composing for a digital environment and an understanding of visual rhetoric, which students demonstrate with the creation of a digital portfolio at the end of the term, a platform that may include images, video, and audio and other multimodal aspects.

My classroom method consists of engaging students through dialogue, often asking them to comment based on their own experience, and I frequently turn the class over to groups of students who lead discussions, based on my modeling and preparation. As a performance studies scholar, I am especially aware of how students embrace or reject identification with markers of gender, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, and subculture. I guide students to be conscious of their own performances and to be aware of their own resistances to texts, discourses, and assignments, so that they can make these resistances work for their writing. Furthermore, the discipline of performance studies treats performance not just as something to be studied but also as a methodology: a way for knowledge and the sharing of knowledge to be experienced, enacted, and practiced.  I use performance and performative techniques to expand on and breathe life into theory.  By involving students in various projects and experiments that heighten their engagement in the theoretical constructs, I hope to bring them to an understanding of concepts through experiential means.  In my performance of literature classes, performance projects are the primary method for critical engagement. In other classes, I have assigned various projects that involve both adapting texts for performance and creating original material to aid in reading comprehension and engagement with cultural, religious and gender issues. 

 Many of my courses are seminars offered in the First Year Program, and thus, adhere to the goals of Liberal Education as prescribed by DePaul University, namely reflectiveness, value consciousness, critical and creative thinking, and multicultural perspective. As stated earlier, I urge students to see themselves in what they learn, locating themselves in the field of discourse. Thus, I have encouraged students to write and perform from their own experiences and backgrounds, highlighting cultural diversity and an auto-ethnographic sensibility. Some students have employed slang and bi-lingual dialogue to illustrate scenes from their culturally diverse families and communities, and to analyze cultural practices through ethnography. Especially in classes that utilize ethnography, I emphasize value consciousness, by presenting material that demonstrates how cultural or religious beliefs are embodied, what they mean to people and what issues they raise. I advocate an approach that neither supports nor “debunks” any belief as such, even when that belief may seem a bit strange, as aspects of occultism might seem to first-year students.

As a teacher of writing in the department of Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse, I have committed myself to teaching students not just how to write academic papers, but to understand how rhetoric and discourse function in their academic careers, their professional lives and their personal lives. While students may have experience in other writing courses in which topics from other fields are merely the subject matter for writing, my courses, particularly my Composition and Rhetoric I course, emphasizes writing as a topic itself. Aided by using the challenging text Writing About Writing, I encourage students to take a “meta” approach to their own writing and participation in a wide variety of academic and non-academic discourses, and to pay attention to the rhetorical effect of what they produce, whether that production is a speech, a paper, a blog, a website, a video, or a tweet. As someone who believes in the evolving nature of writing, rhetoric, and discourse, I fully embrace the changing needs of the contemporary college writer who is asked to participate in a fully mediatized and digital world. Thus, I require students to create digital portfolios for all my classes, not just the writing courses that require it. All of my courses have a significant online component, especially involving communication with other students through discussion boards and dropboxes. As students are increasingly savvy with technology and are asked to perform at higher levels in these areas as graduates, it would be highly irresponsible for a writing teacher to not cultivate and support those skills.

Overall, I believe that in every educational venture it is essential to combine creative and imaginative faculties with critical and interpretive methods. I encourage students to critically approach course material, sometimes with a skeptical eye, especially when I teach in classes that utilize ethnography, where controversial topics abound, as in my courses on Irish Myth and Politics or Occultism and Popular Culture. Additionally, I have offered several of my courses over a number of years, and I constantly update and addend the reading material to take into account current scholarship and world events, and to integrate my own ongoing research. Therefore, my own critical work directly informs what I introduce into the classroom and how I engage with my students.

Finally, my goal as a teacher is to influence students beyond the confines of academic life, by addressing issues such as gender equality and expression, cultural diversity and community values. Particularly in my course on Burning Man and Festival Culture, I use the 10 principles proposed by the Burning Man community, which include Participation, Radical Self-Reliance, Radical Self-Expression and Community Effort. I create an atmosphere that empowers students to take responsibility for their own education, help each other and contribute to the community of the classroom. Recently, in a reflection essay for the Joss Whedon class, a student discussed how the class offered her solace in a lonely first year college environment, reporting that "this was the one class that had people who understood my interests and my way of thinking." In a personal email, she thanked me for for "creating an environment I didn't feel so alone in." For me, while academic achievement is vital, creating a safe space for students to discover themselves and relate to each other and the world is one of the most important tasks a college professor can perform.