The Campanille at ISU I think I have always wanted to be a teacher, ever since I knew what a teacher was, probably in kindergarten. I decided to pursue a teaching career as soon as I finished high school, enrolling in a the Teacher Training Institute that is run by the National Technological University (UTN), in my home city, Buenos Aires, Argentina. I have been teaching for more than twenty years: before I finished my second year in the Teacher Training program, I already had a full time job as a teacher in a public high school in Buenos Aires.
My teaching philosophy is mainly based on respect, particularly respect for students and the teaching profession. It is also based on a thorough command of content. I believe respect is key in any teaching situation. Showing students respect is essential for them to develop the trust they need to take risks and to grow. Respecting students is often expressed in simple things: showing up to class early, handing papers back on time, phrasing comments on papers politely, respecting office hours, and being available to students for advice. Respecting students also means listening. Mutual respect helps students feel confident enough to express their opinions freely and to get involved in intellectually challenging discussion. I can be considered a very demanding teacher: academically, I always expect the best from my students, but I respect their pace and try to be there to listen to them and give them advice they can use in their academic endeavors. I believe respect is also shown through sympathy and understanding.
Respecting the teaching profession is related to the general and subject-related teaching competencies a professional educator has to demonstrate. These competencies include simple things like good classroom presence, patience, and politeness, and more teaching-oriented issues, such as the choice of suitable teaching strategies and techniques, and the giving of appropriate feedback. I always have in mind the different elements of curriculum design in order to compile with the well-known formula for successful courses: needs, objectives, materials, teaching, and assessment. As teaching has always been my vocation, I enjoy every single stage in the teaching process, from the establishment of students’ need and class objectives, and the careful planning and preparation of a class, to the actual delivery of instruction and the ongoing evaluation of students’ progress.
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I believe a motivated student will go through the learning process less painfully, and I try to do my best to keep my students motivated all the time in and out of class. Motivating students is a simple task when teaching graduate courses, as in the case of the Grammatical Analysis course I have been teaching for the last three years, since I arrived at Iowa State University. I try to incorporate examples of natural language use to every single grammar aspect I teach, informing my classes with corpus-based findings, which helps me connect my teaching to my research interests, and, in many cases, to the research interests of my students. I like to help students find their own research topics, and I try to help them to conduct their own research using techniques in discourse analysis and corpus linguistics. The use of these techniques increases students’ interest dramatically, and students soon feel they can apply the theories and research to their own teaching situation. |
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Coming to Iowa State University also gave me the opportunity to teach one of my favorite classes: discourse analysis. This course is completely different from the grammatical analysis class I teach. In this class, I help students to get a wide spectrum of discourse analysis approaches before I introduce them to the corpus-based study of texts, which is my specialization. In this way, students are able to choose the approach that better suits their previous knowledge and their interests. This class introduces students to different research traditions and methodologies and it has inspired several students to work on their Master theses following these methodologies. When teaching undergraduate classes, motivation can be a bit more difficult to achieve. Even when I teach native speakers of English, I use a wide variety of strategies, techniques, and classroom dynamics that I acquired when teaching English as a foreign language, which help students to avoid boredom and increase motivation. |
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Teaching international students new study skills to succeed in academic tasks at university has been my passion for many years, even in the days when I was teaching English as a foreign language in Argentina. The program for the study of academic skills for international students offered by the English Department at ISU is a well-organized program with a lot of potential. Ever since I arrived at Iowa State, I have been teaching the academic writing class for graduate students. This class is very special to me, because I wish I had had the chance of taking a class like this one as an international graduate student. Unfortunately, many schools do not have the resources necessary to provide students with the opportunity to polish their academic writing skills the way this class does. Teaching this class motivated me to write the proposal for the Liberal Arts and Science Computer Advisory Committee (LASCAC) grant that I got for the spring and summer terms of 2004. This grant allowed me to design a new academic writing class for international graduate students which is corpus-based and, at the same time, focuses on the writing of academic disciplines in particular. Thorough content knowledge is the last part of my philosophy I will discuss. I am committed to providing students with an excellent expression of the content of the area I teach. In an attempt to reach this goal, I am striving to achieve the breadth and depth of knowledge of my own teachers: Mary McGroarty, Jean Zukowski-Faust, and Doug Biber, and many other teachers I took classes from both in Argentina and the United States. From them I have learned the importance of continually reviewing recent journals and including the newest research, along with the old standards, being eclectic when designing course curricula and daily classes. The inspiration I have gotten from them motivates me to teach from their example, that is, from an extraordinary knowledge base. You might find this teaching philosophy simple and not too technical. This simplicity is intentional, as I believe simplicity is closely related to teaching effectiveness. I build my teaching lessons trying to find some balance between my students’ needs, their likes, my knowledge of the subject, and my own teaching needs and likes. Even though I have been teaching for more than twenty years, I still feel the moment I close my classroom door and start teaching is one of the happiest moments of my day. |
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