David McCalmon

My Teaching Philosophy

Being Human, Seeing People, Growing Together

I aim to foster inclusive learning environments through consciousness of what it means to be human in a multispecies world; furthermore, I champion individual and cultural backgrounds to help students develop confidence in a safe space. In reaching for this environment in where growth is possible, I show my students I recognize their personhood to foster an attitude of humanity, a belief that learning together and with the world helps us to become self-actualized human beings. I teach analytical skills so that students can come to recognize themselves as writers capable of changing their worlds , changing their drafts, refining their craft, and perhaps most importantly, cultivating their own minds. I want them to see that how and what they perceive themselves to be is malleable, that they themselves are the “malleabilizers“ — they can sculpt their identities to become whatever sort of human they wish, and from that vantage point of agency, change the world — in harmony with the world 

Having written a near-complete series of four novels on the subject of animal personhood in a changing climate, I have thought a lot about what it means to experience life as other animals might, but writing these books has also helped me to understand what it means to think as a human animal.  I’m convinced that humans are at their best when following their natural tendencies: to work in groups toward both common and disparate goals, to become reality-shapers who work together and with the planet, as many nonwestern human societies have before. 

That harmony becomes all the more complex and rich when the potential for personhood and the development of consciousness is unlocked. There are as many different kinds of people as there are people. As a father of a trans teenager, I’m a proactive, assertive, and sensitive advocate of gender expression and inquiry. As a student of history, I forever seek to deepen my understanding of how the consequences of slavery and subsequent institutions of racism have shaped our country and our conceptions of racial identity. As a student of ecology who has made companions of both humans and other animals throughout his life, I see humanity as a particular species of animal living in intertwinement, sometimes harmonious and sometimes destructive, with other animals and forces of nature. Although I am informed by history, I seek to know students on their own terms, whatever they may present to me. As humans, we are particularly capable of shaping reality through the development of consciousness through education. 

Being opposed to the traditional education system, which Paulo Freire has usefully summarized as “the banking system” — the instructor “deposits” his knowledge into student minds so that they can dutifully digest and regurgitate information — I propose a method rooted in Donna Haraway’s “thinking with” and “becoming with” others, a method that posits that people learn best in conjunction with each other. Although Haraway primarily speaks in terms of ecology, I extend these ideas to creating interdependent processes of learning. This kind of working together is accomplished through sharing the goals of the process with students so that they can together become active participants in their education.

In working together to grow as a group and learn to think critically as individuals, having vulnerability is key. I believe that to invite my students to disarm themselves and share vulnerably in class, I need to model that vulnerability. I share of myself openly as it pertains to class discussions; I tell students about struggles I’ve had in school, about troubles my own children have had, and I share funny anecdotes about my time on Earth, not just as a teacher, a writer, and a forever student, but as a human being. I connect personally with my students and learn about them so that they know intuitively and explicitly that I care about them as people. Humans are gregarious creatures, I tell my students: Most humans will want to help if they know each other — and teachers are humans, too. 

As humans, like any other spurned animal, students are slow to trust. Years in the public school system often have failed to teach them that teachers care about their well-being, let alone much scaffolding for writing a paper or reading a challenging text. I recognize that there are as many educational backgrounds as there are students, that these problems only begin at race, gender, sex, but also at (human) species, that lived experience can both traumatize and free, individualizing at every part of life. It’s my aim to bring them together into the group as well as to celebrate their individualities, to create assemblages of knowledge, experience, and expression that both champion and transcend our individual selves. Helping them understand my investment in their cooperative experience is vital. 

But students don’t initially arrive with a cooperative mindset; how can they when they’ve all suffered one teacher or another who failed to work with them, who neglected to acknowledge their good will and efforts, who failed to see their personhood? On the first day, students stare at me at the front of the room and wait for me to dictate the terms of our engagement — many expect adversarialness or even hostility. I aim to subvert their expectations as quickly as possible. 

To this end, together, we rearrange seating in a circle to displace my authority and reinvest it among students. Because the locus of authority tends to follow the instructor, I ask students to sit in new spots each class, and I also sit somewhere different each meeting. I doggedly learn their names the first week as well as a few items of interest I’ve asked them to share in class. I give them my own stories. We share music this first week; I give them some deep cuts from twentieth-century rock, and they educate me about new tunes from new (to me) genres. Sometimes, I like to move away from the fluorescent lights and electronics and take students outside so that we can think inspirationally with nature.

Changing the class environment keeps students in a mindset of adaptation, which befits a species of reality shapers, and although change can sometimes feel confronting, by including it at this fundamental level on a daily basis, I introduce change as a dependable constant, developing their malleability and also their sense of choice given changing variables. Vulnerability arises from moving out of one’s comfort zone, and although I ultimately want students to feel relaxed in the classroom, changing seats can help to feel alert and engaged while leaning into courage. Only by taking courage in the face of adversity, even with teammates, as I suggest students think of their classmates, can students take active roles in developing agency, both together and apart. It’s at this stage that we are primed to engage vulnerably and critically. 

I define a successful classroom interaction, with one student or many, as one that has engendered connection and understanding, which I consider to be a natural state of being human. When my students read literature assignments, we read them in class as a group; for every one paragraph I model, a student reads the next. As I’ve taken voice acting classes on character and on long-form narration, I model reading classic literature by giving somewhat silly but accurate voices to characters and to the tone of the text; then, I encourage students to project their own voices. I am careful to avoid stereotyping by giving voice to problematic sections or characters myself. At each step of the reading, I offer historical context as well as analytical insight. I pause to solicit analysis from students. I draw out humor from the texts we read. As individuals, my students write creative and analytical pieces in response to our readings, both in class and at home. In helping students experience texts, they become humans capable of error but also of innovation; they become free through structure and choice to express; they become comfortable writing.

As for my role in helping students discover their agency, I see myself best as a guide, but even this word, with both its nonauthoritative approach and its inherent assumption that the guide “knows the way” fall short. I endeavor to find moments when students can lead the way themselves; it’s important that they articulate their own destinations and use organizational strategies I offer as structures they can try on for a semester and carry with them to use or discard at their discretion. Introducing students to different writing styles and genres, to  new and inspirational readings to attach to their existing knowledge-bases, is my goal. I understand the power a teacher has to mold minds, and I am wary of this power: I want students to accept what I have to offer as potentially useful information and to discern for themselves how they might use it in conjunction with whomever they are when they enter the classroom. I want to meet them where they’re at. In this way, being met as they are and inquiring into what sort of humans they might like to become, students learn to mold their own minds — and that they can do it over again whenever they choose.