I believe the strength of the English discipline is its ability to interrogate existence without limiting possibilities of meaning. No single interpretation exhausts a literary text, nor is there one single means of accomplishing a rhetorical aim. I believe it is important to encourage my students to wrestle with this ambiguity in literature and their own writing. Working with literary texts that produce a multiplicity of meanings allows students to recognize that a number of valid perspectives can exist simultaneously. This prepares them for a world that refuses to give easy answers. Literature forces students to grapple with complexity, inspires them to engage in empathetic imagination and trains them to navigate narratives. Rhetoric trains students to identify rhetorical aims, teaches them persuasive techniques, and instructs them to distinguish style and substance. These tools are essential for students to navigate human life in its interpersonal, communal, and societal complexity.

It is in light of this complexity that I build my classrooms around asking good questions. I see my classroom as a place of exploration, a safe place for students to begin asking the big questions of meaning and purpose. This approach has been informed by my academic work on existentialism. Existentialism emphasizes philosophy as a way of life, and in my classes I craft questions with the intention of spurring my students to examine their assumptions. By inviting my students to begin asking these questions my classes become a safe space for exploring different ways of being. I teach them there is value in rethinking the ways they’ve been taught to think, emphasizing that periods of doubt and uncertainty are good if they take those crises as an opportunity to interrogate what they believe and why they believe it. I tell them that even if they end up reaffirming their earlier beliefs, by wrestling with their doubts they will have gained a greater maturity in those beliefs. This leads me to blend discussion questions with rhetorical questions designed to promote both classroom dialogue and individual reflection. This style takes into account that we are individuals but are individuals who exist within a community. My approach recognizes that the large questions of human existence are questions we each have to ask ourselves, and that literature can help us, together, to begin to find answers.

My literature classrooms challenge students to enter into the perspective of the novel, to recognize how form, language, characterization, and plot develop a unique vision of the world. These classes are built around dialogue. I draw their attention to some feature of the text and then ask a series of pointed questions about the significance of that detail. This trains students to identify what types of details are important and prompts them to use textual features as the basis for offering an interpretation. For instance, when I taught G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, I had students look at how the six detectives represent different philosophical approaches. In the next class I split the students into six groups and directed each group to look at one of the detective’s contributions to a conversation about the nature of the central figure of the novel, Sunday. Their observations became the launching point for answering two of the biggest questions the novel poses: who is Sunday, and what does it mean for your greatest enemy to also be your greatest friend?

My goal when I begin my rhetoric courses is to impress students with the need to distinguish opinion and argument. I do this by discussing the way our psychology works against us. We discuss how psychological tendencies like the backfire effect, compensatory control, and intentionality disrupt our ability to think clearly. This serves two purposes. The first is to establish the importance of rhetorical moves in anticipating and countering the instinctual reactions of their readers. The second is to inspire my students to develop a healthy scepticism towards their instinctual stances. This training prepares them to approach the pre-writing stage and drafting stage more thoughtfully. To encourage my students to let evidence shape their thesis, I design my assignment sheets around steps they should take. These steps direct them to return to their research and to hold off formulating a thesis until they have done enough groundwork to justify their opinion. Then, when they begin drafting I teach them to think through what questions their readers need to answered for the argument to be convincing. By teaching them the psychology behind readerly resistance I show them why they need to think rhetorically.

When I teach writing I encourage my students to learn through imitation. The first thing I tell my students is that good writers are good readers. In order to learn how to write well you need to read, find out who you like, and practice writing like them. As we work through class texts I point them to successful moves the authors make and discuss why they worked. I give them an assignment to go out and find three to five favorite sentences. I tell them these can be from anywhere: a poem, a novel, a movie, or a cereal advertisement. In class we put a couple of these sentences up on the white board and break down what exactly makes the sentence effective, then write a new sentence modelled off that sentence. Once they get the hang of this activity, I have them write new sentences based on the sentences they brought in. Finally, I create a bracket to determine the best rewritten sentence. I split the class into groups of three and have each group pick one sentence before having the class vote on their favorite sentence. I conclude the class by showing them how by imitating good writers they can learn to write well themselves.

I have adapted these student-centered approaches in my role as teaching assistant for an experimental course on creativity and as the instructor of an Honors course on the intersection of video games and philosophy. In the former, I helped students learn to write poetry, use math to create art, and exercise creativity in collaborative environment. Working with three different professors from English, Math, and Performing Arts, I was responsible for grading their assignments, easing the transition between professors, and providing continuity through discussion sections. In my class on video games and philosophy, I led my students in discussions on topics like ethics, identity, freedom, and aesthetics in relation to video games. We discussed how philosophy impacts our understanding of the design process and how we think through our participation as players. Both of these courses offered me the opportunity to experiment with classroom engagement. Because video games and creativity are uniquely participatory subjects, I worked on developing classes that took advantage of this feature. For instance, when we discussed freedom in video games we played the game “The Stanley Paradox,” which uses a narrator to interrogate the concepts of freedom and determinism. We discussed that while the game allowed freedom within the programming, ultimately players were still at the mercy of what choices the game allowed. This allowed us to think of the relationship between freedom and contingency both in video games and in their broader lives.