Julianne Newmark

Teaching Philosophy

Julianne Newmark, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of English
New Mexico Tech

The diverse areas of my scholarly research inform my teaching philosophy in significant ways. My work in American literary and cultural studies, Native American studies, and multi-ethnic American literary studies influences my classroom practices, in both literature and writing courses. The ways in which various communities in America have engaged with questions of land, race, and identity -- questions that prompt my research reliance on work in human geography and environmental studies -- figure importantly in discussions in my classes and are often the catalysts for students' written assignments. My pedagogical experiences as a faculty member at a small comprehensive state university and, previously, as a graduate student at a large urban research institution have been broad, but a central community-centric ethos has persisted in my teaching across these years and institutions: how do diverse groups of people, who share the same physical site, construct a unified sense of community? This question drives my teaching philosophy.

My students come to the university with experiences born of their diverse histories, as residents of rural and urban places, as members of families of economic wealth as well as poverty, and as individuals with a great many ethnic and cultural heritages. Despite the multiple discourse communities that my students represent, I strive to bring these students together as a "we." I have met with great successes in the pursuit of this goal as well as considerable challenges, as some students' inexperience with cultural and ethnic diversity has resulted in volatile classroom moments. Yet my commitment to this goal has not flagged, despite occasional obstacles.

The breadth of my research interests as well as my teaching experience make me an adaptable teacher and a teacher continually committed to empowering my students simultaneously as individuals and as active participants in their university community and beyond. In all of my courses (ranging from literature surveys and seminars to undergraduate and graduate writing classes), I create a thematic course focus that serves as an umbrella for discussions during multi-week “sequences”; these sequences are shaped around significant sub-foci on which the overall theme relies. Large thematic foci in my writing courses have been "Complex America and the American Complex," "Narrative Trouble," “Writing Across Communities: Community Safety and Health,” and “Identifying American Argument: Race, Gender, and the Rhetoric of Identity.” Students’ discussions, blog responses, group-work, and essays address various sub-dimensions of these larger issues; my goal is to promote sensitivity to the multiple aspects of large issues that often dominate public discourse. In my literature courses (of which I have taught a variety, as my cv reveals), my tactic is similar. I call upon my students to participate as active textual critics, as critics who are well aware of the historical, cultural, and political contexts for literary creation as well as of the often fraught individual circumstances out of which an author’s texts emerged.

In literature classes, such as the undergraduate American Literature survey, I aim to demonstrate that no text exists in a geographical or temporal vacuum. I urge students to engage with both canonical and non-canonical American texts as meditations on the relationships between "people and place." American literature takes as one of its most important concerns the question of how one can create a sense of national identity in a place where people come from many other places, from many other national and cultural identities and traditions. The canonical and non-canonical writers who form the category "American literature" also reflect the ethnic and economic diversity that students discover in their literature and composition classrooms (and in the classrooms of their other courses). My students read a diverse array of authors and I strive to include Native American, African American, Chicano/a, European-immigrant, and women authors in each of my courses, in addition to authors from other immigrant communities and authors considered traditionally canonical. This array of authors demonstrates the multivocality and complexity of America throughout its history and reinforces the diversity and multiple voices within the contemporary university. I have also designed graduate-level seminar courses and I am excited to develop my teaching skills and strategies in that new and rigorous classroom context.

In all of my courses, my students sit in a circle (if the furniture is moveable). I am a part of this circle with my students. Thus, even my beginning literature and writing courses function, in many ways, as seminars. Students can see each other and they can see me; they realize the necessity of their engagement with the material as a result of their participation in our circle of discussion, debate, and inquiry. I also frequently have students work in small groups so that students can do close work with smaller sections of text or can grapple with a particular problem of analysis or composition. Once the class reconvenes as a whole, each group of students feels itself competent in a particular area and contributes to the close textual analysis and/or essay construction work we do as a class. I synthesize the students’ responses, verbally or on our computer-projector screen (in a “smart classroom”), and I expand on their ideas and add to them important issues they might have overlooked. In composition courses in particular, I often generate and project on our screen, based on the students’ input, sample introductory essay paragraphs for students to use as models and I emphasize that these paragraphs were collectively constructed by the class. I then put these paragraphs or notes on my website (or, during terms that I use it, on the course’s WebCT or Blackboard site) so that when the students are working on their individual papers, they can refer to these sample paragraphs as guides. I call upon all students freely in my courses, requiring of them active engagement with the course materials, with their peers, and with me as their professor.

All of my classes have their own blog sites as well. I often will post a prompt to which students can reply with their “comments”; other times, I will post sample essay questions or paragraphs of analysis that student groups have crafted during class-time. This way, students are actively involved in the direction of our discussion and even in the options they have when I give essay assignments, in-class exams, or lengthy group projects. I draw some of their writing choices from ideas students develop on our blog.

I have high standards for my students during classroom discussions as well as in their written work. My students have called me a "hard grader" as I believe that "average work" is in fact "C"-level work. A student of mine must excel and demonstrate great commitment to the course materials, during and outside of class time, to receive an "A." I expect of my students excellent attendance and punctuality. My students, in literature and composition courses, write many essays of various lengths and I provide them with lengthy comments and detailed grading rubrics that articulate for them their strengths and weaknesses with sentence-level and larger conceptual issues. I post essay assignments, rubrics, and class notes for my students in the “Current Courses” section of my website.

Beyond the classroom, I have also supported the development of communities of students devoted to intellectual exchange. Since arriving at NMT, I have served as a speaker for the American Indian Science and Engineering Society and I have promoted student involvement in our university’s writing program by advertising, hiring, and supervising two undergraduate student workers whose specific role is to aid faculty in efforts to incorporate meaningful writing exercises in all of their classes. I have also served on the Learning Community committee at NMT; previously, I directed Service Learning courses during my postdoctoral fellowship. I have designed our Writing Program website at NMT and have supervised students in their internships and departmental work focused on integrating technology into our departmental processes and teaching. Most significant, however, as evidence of my outside-of-classroom commitment to student learning, is my work as editor of the e-journal Xchanges, a peer-reviewed publication that features research essays and multi-modal presentations/texts by undergraduate- and graduate-student scholars from American and abroad. The journal is listed in the MLA International Bibliography. As journal Editor, I supervise student workers who learn web-design, editing, journal administration, and the nuances academic writing.

I am an award-winning teacher with an established history of dedication to mentorship and student development. My teaching is based on the belief that students, whatever their level of skill upon entering the university, can develop an investment in their own abilities to convey ideas in writing, to interpret texts of various genres and historical periods, and to leverage these skills to areas of applicability in their day-to-day lives, in academic communities and beyond them.