Inscribed on the main entrance of Penn State’s formidable Pattee-Paterno Library is a quote by the nineteenth century philosopher Thomas Carlyle, “The true university is a collection of books.” As long as I have been a graduate student and an instructor at Penn State, I have passed this stone-carved quote hidden behind tall pillars when making my frequent visits to the stacks for a new book to read. Since I have found so much of my own scholarly direction in the library, it has occurred to me that a library should be precisely the model that my classroom should follow. However, the architecture of my classroom is not neoclassical; though my own research focuses on the nineteenth century, I interact with my students in the present-day context of learning to understand and appreciate texts in their various temporal contexts, from bodies that are planted in twenty-first century classrooms. Rather than the building itself, the library inscription, which encourages visitors to carve their own educational pathways through the archives of knowledge compiled before, resonates with the learning mind with which I approach my own classroom, and the learning mind with which I hope to help my students adopt as long as they continue to read. The most important thing that I have learned as an instructor is that a classroom is not a stone-carved monolith wherein I instill knowledge upon my students, but it is rather the archive of books inside, of which I am a librarian, curator, and historian.
Every archive needs to begin somewhere; mine begins with a story of my own journey to becoming a holistic and adaptive instructor. In my Summer 2019 Rhetoric and Composition class, I assigned a group project that required students to present a pitch for a new non-profit organization on the last day of class. All was well until the day arrived, and I came down with a severe migraine just an hour and a half before I needed to teach—and furthermore to be mentally present to grade my students. I realized that, since there were no more class days left in the semester for my students to present, I needed to don a pair of sunglasses, take my medication, and push through my illness to teach class. Though this experience was painful to me in more ways than physical, the most important realization that came to me was that if I, as an instructor, should not have had to forgo taking care of myself to participate in class, my students in a similar situation should not have to sacrifice their health to complete course requirements that could have been made more flexible to begin with. Any of my students could have also been sick that day and would have also needed to present in class. This painful lesson has helped to motivate me to be an instructor who invests care in the classroom and who sees not only students in the classroom, but whole people. Furthermore, this experience has motivated me to find more ways to lead my students through a learning environment that is individual, collective, and multiplicitous enough to acknowledge the whole and not only the student part.
As an archivist in the classroom, it is important to me that I curate myself as an instructor by keeping abreast of pedagogy scholarship and professional development opportunities. As a graduate student, I have made concrete steps toward becoming more structurally-aware instructor, such by taking both English and Comparative Literature pedagogy courses as well as a month-long online course in Universal Design for Learning. Universal Design for Learning has become especially important in my classroom, since implementing UDL allows me to lead the most students that I can toward developing individual learning responses to curricula. For example, my syllabi often include self-paced assignments and deadlines as well as menu-based assignment prompts that allow students to think creatively about how their strengths and interests might interact with the course material. Beyond learning skills to improve myself as an instructor, participating actively in professional development has helped me to situate myself in a network of other instructors. I am constantly learning with and from my colleagues, who have showed me that education is a group activity. My course archive is co-constructed with my fellow instructors and with my students.
My own teaching repertoire is a constantly evolving collection. Each new course that I teach, and each permutation of each course, helps me to understand how to be a better instructor for every other course. As an instructor of Rhetoric and Composition, I have learned how to ask students to self-assess. This crucial skill is central to my approach to student writing; students in my classroom always get second chances (and sometimes third chances) to revise and resubmit, as long as they are willing to take serious steps to learn and grow. Although this means that I have a few more papers to grade each assignment cycle, the long-lasting improvement that I see in student compositions has convinced me in the necessity of this sacrifice. As an instructor of World Drama, I have learned how to guide students through ideas, and even more importantly, how to allow my students to guide me through their own ideas. Since I have taught this course, my classroom approach has become far more open and conversational; students set the pace of instruction for the day and I adapt my lesson plans to accommodate their interests. Centering student ideas and growth has helped my classroom become a welcoming space where my students feel comfortable approaching me in authentic ways about their questions, concerns, and sparks of interest. This has greatly benefitted both my students and me.
As my library grows alongside the library that I have to offer my students, I realize that as long as I teach at a university, I will always be learning. Though I am still at the beginning of my teaching career, I have seen great improvements in how my students perceive my courses. Memorable feedback that I hold close includes a student who commented anonymously on my course review that I helped my students to write the essays that they wanted to write, not the ones that I had in mind for them. In my future years as an instructor, I hope to see feedback like this multiply. I hope that each of my student feels like their journey through my classroom is their own, and that the possible takeaways from each course are wide as a library is stacked with books.