Teaching with Technology: Remediating the Teaching Philosophy Statement

Although this article was geared towards graduate students looking for a career in higher education, I still think that there is some validity at the k - 12 level as well. I was department chair this year, and was part of a hiring committee to hire a new Language Arts teacher. Currently, our district does not require applicants to submit a teaching philosophy statement. This means that I spent a considerable amount of time sorting through applications, cover letters, and resumes trying to find applicants that would be a good fit at our school. Unfortunately, the reality is that Utah is in the midst of a teacher shortage, so my options were limited. Thus our criteria for getting a an interview boiled down to experience, and endorsements, which told us little about who these people were specifically as teachers. In hindsight, a teaching philosophy would have helped our committee be more efficient and more confident in who we were hiring.

Thinking about my own philosophy, I found many sections of this article paralleled my own struggles with the teaching writing with technology philosophy statement. I identified with Julie’s reflection from the case study. She “focused so singularly on saying the “right” things that she couldn’t see herself in what she had written” (Alexander et al. 13). Even though I felt like my philosophy accurately depicted my beliefs and practices in the classroom, I felt like I left a lot of myself out, due to limitations on space. Similar to the authors of this article, I wonder if “writing teachers need two different—or three or four or more—teaching philosophies” (11). Here is where, I think working in digital mediums will be beneficial. As we have seen from multiple authors, working in various modalities allows composers to be more effective and intentional with the space given. I think that the traditional alphabetic teaching philosophy allowed myself to establish a teaching identity, the process of remixing this in other forms will force me to really think about the complexity of my pedagogical approach and hopefully be more intentional about how I teach.