Finishing up my promotion materials — here’s my one-page teaching statement, in the interest of transparency.
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Mohanraj Teaching Statement:
All of us teaching literature and creative writing have faced new challenges in the last several years. My general teaching goals have always been: a) to develop the student’s individual voice and thoughts, helping to strengthen their sense of who they are and what they think, and b) to give students the ability to be critical about their ideas, so that they have strong ground supporting their concepts. But added to that is a new goal that I think may be more important than either – doing everything I can to foster sincere and hopefully enthusiastic engagement with the material, and with their own thoughts.
During the first year of the pandemic, when we were all trying to build the plane while we flew it, I turned to Darby and Lang’s excellent text, Small Teaching Online, for guidance. I had taught a few online workshops before, but never full courses, and my own experience in taking an online course had led to a rapid failure of engagement – by the third week, I’d stopped participating entirely. I had the advantage in 2020 that many of my students honestly wanted to be in my class. But without the energy lent by face-to-face interaction, many of them struggled, as did I.
I talked to colleagues with more online teaching experience, learned the difference between hybrid and hyflex modes, and over the next year, developed strategies that led most of my students to reasonable success. Some even thrived in the online environment, but others found it almost impossible to maintain engagement with the material. Some of that struggle was due to issues beyond simple course modalities – I had one student who lost four family members in one month in spring of 2020, for example. Many of my students were struggling with grief, illness, family needs, sudden shifts in work demands, and the emotional trauma of living through a global disaster.
Through all of that, I strove to support my students as much as possible, following up with students who started ‘ghosting’ the class, giving them hyflex options long after the university no longer required it. All of this required nimbleness in teaching approach, additional patience, and attention to detail, which was frankly challenging, but I’m pleased with the results – I was determined to get as many of my students through as possible.
The key to that, I think, was bringing my own passionate engagement to the material, and thereby awakening similar passionate engagement in my students. If they honestly cared about what they were learning, if they could see why it was both interesting and relevant to their lives, even during a pandemic, then they kept doing the work – kept reading, kept discussing in class, and kept writing. Some of them, I think, even grew to see how literature can be a lifeline in times of trauma.
Now we face new challenges, with the rise of ChatGPT and other forms of ‘AI.’ I was teaching only creative writing this past semester, so didn’t have to do quite as much to ensure my students were actually doing their own work – I expect teaching literature in the fall will be more challenging. But in the end, my approach will be the same – to foster enthusiastic and sincere engagement with the material.
I see professors talking about bringing back blue books (which are problematic on the disability front), using other AI programs to ‘catch cheaters,’ and I seriously question those approaches. Firstly, those who really want to cheat, will always find a way to do so. But more importantly, if we develop an antagonistic relationship with our students, that will, in the end, destroy our respect for them, and their respect for us. It will foster an authoritarian mindset and culture that is poisonous to true learning, which should be a joyful process of discovery, collaboration, and deep thought.
In creative writing, my preference is to concentrate first on giving them craft, the structure and skills of writing fiction, while at the same time encouraging them to take on difficult thematic material. I find that beginner and intermediate writers have a strong tendency to get caught up in the storytelling or stylistic aspects of writing, neglecting thematic issues – I encourage them to question why they are telling a particular story, to ask what about that story seems significant. Once a student starts developing a thematic understanding of their own work, that understanding can effectively shape the revision process, lending direction and clarity. When teaching literature, I also tend towards a thematic approach, generally within a historical/cultural/political context, and with a specific awareness of multicultural, feminist, and when applicable, post-colonial concerns.
I generally favor an intensive-writing approach and encourage a collaborative process; I find the process of writing detailed critiques often teaches students more about writing than any other element of the course. I emphasize the value of revision, and prefer to focus on larger structural issues early in the semester, saving the fine details of grammar, spelling, and more subtle argumentation for later. I aim for pedagogical transparency, striving to be as clear as possible about my goals for particular assignments and my rationale for assigning those goals. I have found that the more transparent I can make my teaching, the more likely my students are to engage whole-heartedly with the work.
That engagement is what will make them true scholars and writers in the end.
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(Arya says: Good job. More scritching, please.)