Reflecting on these salient characteristics of teachers who have best supported and educated me, I think one important aspect of my approach to teaching will be my intentionality in showing to my students that I am a human, with a real past, diverse experiences, strengths, weaknesses, and dreams. In doing this, I will also be poised to reveal my own experiences have informed my ontology, epistemology, and research paradigm. By revealing these foundational pieces of myself as an educator and lifelong learner, I would have positioned myself to invite my students to explore how their own experiences have informed their ways of conceptualizing reality, ways of knowing, and ways of regarding what is researchable and how.
In the classroom, my goal is to create a safer space, where learners agree to be just a bit vulnerable—enough to explore their experiences and how their own lives affect their scholarship. Since I have a transformative research paradigm, my classes will also be framed in the context of social justice. Whether I am teaching a Human Development class, an Evaluation class, or a Research Writing class, I will always try to support learners in making the connection to how our work in class applies to the greater social context. Since I also value experiential learning, I will also try to engage students in real-life experiences, rather than classroom-based simulations or written scenarios.
Since I also regard reflection as a valuable component of learning, I will also engage my students in both individual and group reflection—both of which can also contribute to individual and class evaluation, which should be an ongoing process throughout the course. Finally, since I also value participatory approaches, from the beginning of the course, I will engage learners in contributing to the course design and content—from readings and assignments to course structure and assessment practices. I really do hope, as an educator, that I am able to engage, inspire, challenge, and support learners.
In order to begin discovering my authentic teaching self, I must reflect on my own learning experiences. As a learner, I have benefitted most from teachers you made me feel like they knew and cared about me as an individual learner, by both celebrating and challenging my strengths and supporting me to develop my areas for growth. I have also enjoyed having teachers who in some way showed me that they were human—whether by revealing something s/he struggled with as a student in the past, sharing something some from her/ his personal life, or reaching out to me in some way.