Dr. Aaron Scully
Teacher
My Teaching and Learning Philosophy:
As an educator, my teaching and learning philosophy is grounded in the belief that learning should be honest, active, collaborative and transformative. By utilizing the dynamics of the classroom environment, adapting each class to the evolving needs of the students, and promoting a safe, yet challenging space to learn, students who actively engage in my classroom will benefit greatly and, by the end of each semester, achieve some sort of perspective shift, a widening scope of their world view and a heightened ability to think critically about the subject on which they have been taught. It is my hope that after taking one of my classes, a student will experience growth which will help them to achieve their goals and attain their dreams.
In my years of higher education, I have earned a Bachelor’s degree, two Master’s degrees and a Ph. D. This means I have spent more than ten years of my adult life attending classes on a regular basis. I have been taught by many teachers with many different teaching styles. It is through my experiences as a student in the classroom that I formed my philosophy about the most effective way to teach. The varying teaching philosophies and pedagogical practices I witnessed allowed me to pull aspects of teaching I thought particularly successful and create an overall philosophy that includes my own distinct perspective. I believe in the power of narrative in the classroom. I always find that teachers who intersperse their life experience into their teaching ignites engagement in a way that is more effective than a traditional passive information exchange lecture style.
As a teacher of the arts, perhaps my most important mission is to help my students discover their aesthetic. My job is to get them to open their eyes to this beautiful and complicated world, reflect on it, challenge it, discuss and explore it and then push them to incorporate their worldview into their artistry. It is my duty as a teacher to pull more out of the student, to get them to dig deeper and discover their voice. I believe whole-heartedly every human being has a voice. I have yet to not see growth in a student that has recognized they have something important to say.
Creating a positive environment that students look forward to spending time in each week is essential not only to the student’s learning, but is an integral aspect of my own enjoyment of teaching. A positive environment is created through collaboration, transparency and honesty.
Collaboration is a word which seems to have become ubiquitous in the classroom. Though teachers intend to create collaborative classrooms, often the paradigm of their teaching philosophy makes it difficult to shift from a teacher-centered classroom to a student-centered classroom. At this stage in my teaching career, I recognize the difficulty of making a classroom student-centered and am consistently working toward making my classrooms more collaborative. Theatre is a collaborative art form, therefore, as a teacher of theatre it is imperative that collaboration becomes ingrained in the thought-processes of my students. It is my hope that through collaboration in my classroom the process of collaboration in their practical life will become inherent and easily achieved.
Students desire transparency with their teachers and I am willing to be as transparent as I can possibly be. I never want a student to not know why I am grading a certain way or choosing to emphasize one area of a subject over another. Continual transparency takes constant awareness and can be difficult to achieve, but one of my goals is to be as transparent as possible.
Honesty in the classroom is crucial to my teaching philosophy. For collaboration, active learning, and transformation to occur, honesty must be the backbone of the learning process. In theatre, we often talk about the search for truth. One cannot find their truth or their specific voice without being honest about who they are. It is this fostering of self-discovery that is my primary responsibility. A student should not ignore the world that surrounds them. They should appreciate its fragility, diversity and beauty. They should also recognize its ugliness, tragedy and unpredictability. If I can get a student to be honest about how they see the world and what they think their place is in it, then, and only then, am I teaching at my fullest potential.