When students leave my classroom, I expect them to be engaging ethnographers, critical readers, and nomadic practitioners. To accomplish these goals, my pedagogy is guided by four teaching principles:

1. Learning is a contingent and co-constructed process. Each vibe of such a process is about negotiating meaning and difference; each component of such a process is about constructing own ways of thinking, living, and doing. Hence, as a teacher, I consider each student’s endeavors not as ultimate alternatives to obtain grades, rather than as opportunities to grow through his/her languages and literacies. I treat every learner as a unique personality, who embodies learning processes through his/her daily endeavors, like literacies and languages practices and other sociocultural encounters in peculiar ways and trajectories.  Hence, I believe that the most challenging, but rewarding route for my teaching/learning is to leave space for questioning, discussing, and arguing. I strongly believe that nothing can be better than the continuous quest for knowledge. As Abdullah, a student in the ENGL 202 MLW course, states as part of reflective writing, «Dr. Prikhodko would post mindful posts (such as personal reflections) on the D2L page and me being a Muslim, I really liked them! Islam teaches a person to always reflect on their actions and life, so I found her activities very relevant to my own beliefs!»

2. Courses should not only improve students’ learning processes and literacy experiences within academic settings but also encourage critical thinking mindset that facilitates understanding of such as essential to all life domains. I engage students into constructing and maintaining a dialogue with the world around. I want every student to invest into this dialogue and to own such a relationship through various learning forms and genres. To do so, I assemble the course materials and activities in a way to let students reflect on their own life learning backgrounds and gain a better understanding of how their sociocultural encounters inform their idiosyncratic ways of thinking, valuing, and writing. As Laura, one of the students in my ENGL 202 wrote as part of reflective writing, «I know that I will take all of the things I learned and apply it to a lot of future endeavors…This class helped me learn how to have a voice.»

3. Assessment and instruction should exist in symbiosis. My research and experience have helped me construct my teaching approach as holistic. I interrogate my existing assessment models every semester to include emergent components like rubric criteria and their rationale to assess each student's linguistic and rhetorical peculiarities.

4. Multimodalities are crucial for constructing rhizomatic connections between emergent and background learning experiences. All students are life-long learners who make rhizomatic connections between different experiences on a daily basis. While usually seen as deficient, I strong believe that bringing various, seemingly chaotic, connections between domains of life is key to rehashing students’ in- and out-of-school language and literacy practices. Therefore, I employ visual and digital literacies into class activities in order to diversify and complicate students’ rhizomatic connections between life domains. For example, Picture/Video/Mindful Symbol of the Day is embedded into every class to provoke my students to make mental and emotional connections between emergent and background learning practices. As Tom, one of the students in my ENGL 202 wrote as part of reflective writing, “To be able to think critically and write about your thoughts was always a challenge. I have increased those skills I believe each and every class so far we have had. At the beginning of class when we read something like a quote or something then elaborate on it, helps make you think more critically.”

 

Two students demonstrated the kind of commitment and integrity that these principles seek to promote: Luna and Tina. In my ENGL 202 (MLW) course, Luna was engaged in inquiry-based research about a Cambridge community. Even though aligned writing and digital practices with the corresponding instructions (responding to feedback during writing workshops; conducting informal on-site observations; D2L posts; and analyzing Youtube videos), she had little awareness of her unique research position and subsequent actions in the community. Through a sequence of differentiated activities ranging from solving a case problem to a critical analysis of her belonging to the community, Luna engaged in reflective practices that resulted in a deeper understanding of her research as rationalized for her overall life goals. Tina also acquired a certain level of criticality in my other ENGL 202 course. Tina was an experienced but troublesome student. Being part of a military family, she researched cultural meanings of “a military family” community.  During her writing workshop, she responded to a series of challenging questions quite abruptly. As a result of the scaffolded revision, collaborative multimodal activities (writing an ode to research, visualizing life literacies, analyzing videos and contemplative writing practices) and critical ethnographic experiences, she established a more powerful civil position towards a status-quo in the family, and thus her academic endeavors. I believe that these two instances demonstrate learning that I care and facilitate in class. Weaving together an academic perspective and a deep understanding of students’ lived languages and literacies as contingent, the humanizing pedagogy I enact in the classroom encourages breaking dichotomous thinking, deconstructing realities, and craving space for open, civil dialogue between parties.