by John Villanueva Nepomuceno, English Teacher
My emphasis in teaching is on learning centered on a classroom community atmosphere acculturated in success and agency. My teaching goal is to foster a community in the classroom where success is measured by the student’s ability to learn, be it to learn to adapt or adjust, if only to overcome. The ultimate outcome is to ensure that learning and knowledge is valued, and that every student in my classroom belongs to this culture of learning and success. I am not only a teacher. I am a facilitator, an organizer, and a mediator. I choose to facilitate discussions in a classroom that is organized and orderly. I mediate dialogue between myself and my students because I believe that as teacher, my responsibility goes beyond the primordial transaction of teacher knowledge for student consumption, but towards the realm of enabling students to be empowered in the knowledge I attempt to transact, so they may also make new knowledge out of that for which they have been learning about. The responsibilities inherent then are simple. Whereas I am held accountable to teach to the standards that I have been required to impress, my students are held accountable for knowing what has been taught, so they may share that knowledge between themselves and beyond their classroom community as agents of positive change. My emphasis is on success and agency, attained through the classroom community where the transaction of learning and knowledge is not just between the teacher and the peers, but also, the students to their parents, families, home community, and themselves. Much of this knowledge can be, and has been, taken from many an English classroom curriculum. I only seek to further the trend.
I believe that effective teaching is comprised of two necessary elements dependent on each other: establishing order and harmony in a classroom community with an emphasis on success, and communicating knowledge and learning in a way that makes its application to the students both useful and relevant, especially in bettering their own self-agency. Knowing what to teach and how to teach it may not be sufficient enough to be effective, especially in an active and diverse classroom. Thus, it is important for me to take care of the classroom dynamic early on. In establishing a classroom presence and atmosphere premised on respect and safety, I feel that this is where knowledge can be safely valued, and where learning can effectively take place. To make the knowledge understandable for the students is made that much easier when the classroom itself is convinced of its role as an agent of success for all. The communication of knowledge to students then, becomes an exercise in agency, where learning becomes a process of increasing and bettering the students’ own agency, and where students can begin to learn from themselves as agents for each other.
I take great care in being mindful and knowledgeable about the material I teach and the standards that must be kept, but I also emphasize the importance of motivation, and how that can be meted out in a classroom where motivation can be scant. I motivate students to succeed because I am motivated. I am stern, but I am fair, and I am personable, because I am genuine. Genuine, in the sense that I genuinely care about the welfare of my students, and should my students not be successful, then their welfare is at stake, and whatever aspect of that falls under my control, will not be ignored.
Care, guaranteed.
