Teaching Portfolio
Charles Hunter Joplin
MY TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Teaching is a performance: it requires careful planning, a cultivated and attractive personality, and whole body engagement to be truly effective. My years of experience as an actor and singer inform my view of the classroom and my role as the teacher. The board and lectern are the stage and my students are the audience, and my job is to make them as invested in my performance as possible by using all the elements available to me. I treat every single lesson with energy and enthusiasm, and I always try to transfer some of that same passion into my students. There are certain topics that require more solemnity than enthusiasm, but I usually maintain a casual and open tone with my students. I want them to walk out of my classroom with the same pleasure and intrigue that one feels when leaving a Shakespeare play; they need something to talk and think about, a feeling of accomplishment, and the desire to come back for more. Making students feel passionate about their daily activities can be difficult even in the best circumstances, but my students enjoy the energy that I create and the seriousness which I invest in every discussion and every project they suggest.
EDUCATION
RESEARCH INTERESTS
20th Century British Literature
I specialize in World War I poetry, W.H. Auden, the Modernists, and Kazuo Ishiguro.
2014 - Present
The University of Southern Mississippi
M.A. in Literature (ongoing)
Textual Scholarship
I desire to help bridge the gap between bibliography and literary criticism by studying how an author's craft informs our reading and anthologization of the final product.
Ecocriticism
I primarily seek to understand how authors' and readers' treatment of the external world in liteature factors into our stewardship or ruination of the environment.
2010 - 2014
University of Mobile
B.A. in English w/a minor in Political Science
This performance is unique, however, because it involves the audience just as much as the actor. One of the major concepts that I teach my students is that reading and writing is a continuing conversation between author(s) and audience across a variety of media. When they read an article by bell hooks, for example, they should image that she is speaking to them directly and asking them to respond, as an actor would. When they write essays, they should imagine that they are not only speaking directly to the people whom they are writing about but also addressing me and the rest of the class. Reading and writing, therefore, are both performances, but this is also of true of our classroom interactions. When discussing a text or a idea, I will call on students and ask them to respond to a question or line of thought, then ask the class what they think of the students’ response. I enjoy putting my students in groups and having them discuss certain passages from the text, then share their ideas with the other groups. I push them to air, explain, and defend their ideas, and to pursue their lines of thought as far as they can. If I disagree with a students’ opinion, I will rarely state my disagreement outright – I much prefer to add that line of thought to the ongoing conversation and keep the performance going. Workshops are perhaps my favorite classroom activity, as they encourage direct student interaction, shared analysis of student texts, and meaningful one-on-one conversations between my students and I. In media and texts there will always be a line of demarcation between author and reader, but in my classroom there is no fourth wall whatsoever – the audience and actors blend into one and the script dissolves into improv.
Laura Micciche’s concept of rhetorical grammar forms the foundation of my theatre-centric pedagogy, a system which functions as “a tool for articulating and expressing relationships among ideas…to learn how to generate persuasive, clear thinking that reflects on and responds to language as work, as produced rather than evacuated of imperfections” (“Rhetorical Grammar” 720) My work as a Textual Critic has shown me that the process by which texts are created is arguably just as important as the content itself, so to improve the craft of one’s writing will naturally improve their content, and if they have significant content to express they can find the means to do so. Therefore, my exercises are more than merely “repetitive, decontextualized, drill-and-kill exercises” with no function outside the classroom and the parameters of the English discipline (717). Instead, I encourage students to criticize every single media that surrounds them, especially the pop culture that they’re familiar with. I will assign song lyrics, have them analyze advertisements and trailers, and consider the differences between academic and contemporary rhetoric. My ultimate goal as a teacher-performer is to show them that all utterances are necessarily social and they should use rhetoric to define the terms of their own existence as social actors. By utilizing grammar as a means of better understanding themselves in the world, they can gain the mindset needed to become capable students who can act out the roles required of them by the university and become more conscientious citizens in our increasingly pluralistic and multimodal society. All in all, my desire to help young people become knowledgeable and humane citizens is the heart of my teaching philosophy. There’s nothing else to it – like any good actor, I don’t do it for the money.