Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

“middling” and Knoblauch’s own warning against a lacking of
“commitment” very much in mind, this dialectic, or, in Faigley’s
terms, “synthesis,” between “expressivism” and “critical
literacy” is what I feel defines my own philosophy of
composition. It is where I see myself both philosophically and
practically.
To that end, I would leave what I have already said about
my teaching philosophy as the final word on the subject and move
on now to my teaching practice, my methods and, as Dewey had
referred to them, my “materials and occupations,” and, therein,
my repeated attempts to realize, or “operationalize,” that
dialectic-promoting ideal of education as exhibited, again,
through the foundational work of John Dewey and William Perry.
In doing so, I will reference what I did throughout my most
recent writing classes: the required freshman writing course,
“English 110: Critical Reading and Writing,” at the University
of Delaware in Newark, Delaware, which I taught during the Fall
2007 and Spring 2008 semesters. All of the other writing
classes that I have put together and seen through, whether at
the school where I had received my Master’s or SUNY - Stony
Brook on Long Island or Widener in Chester, Pennsylvania, had
brought me to those classes, and the students in them, that I
taught that year at U. of DE. Because of that, they were the
culmination of all my efforts to realize the potential of that
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