Aidan Holtan: Teaching Philosophy

A mistake is the first step in learning something new. As the alma mater of Neil
Armstrong, Purdue University is very interested in first steps—and this interest has also
made its mark in my literature and composition courses during my five years here as an
instructor. Many students begin the semester afraid to make mistakes or, particularly in my
Introductory Composition course, convinced that they know all that they need to learn
about writing and that there are no new mistakes to be made. Over the course of the
semester, my goal is to support both groups of students by encouraging them to push
themselves further, to try new avenues of thought and of writing, and to continually seek
improvement. Whether my classroom is a small, twenty-student composition course or a
large, seventy-student literature survey, I seek to re-create the classroom into a communal
space where students support each other in their learning goals and where they come to see
their mistakes as an important beginning to the learning process, both in the classroom and
in their first steps as lifelong learners in their fields.
In order for students to feel comfortable attempting these first steps, trust needs to
be established in the classroom. Trust is first built on a student-teacher level by
communicating openly with my students. This successful communication is reflected in my
course evaluations, where I consistently score at a 4.8 or above (in a five-point Likert scale,
with five being excellent) for the prompt “When I have a question or comment, I know it
will be respected” and, as one student stated at the end of their evaluation: “I never felt
uncomfortable or awkward asking a question in class or in conference.” While it is important
for students to be able to ask questions to clarify assignments or the class objectives, I also
see this as an opportunity for students to find their academic voice and open up new
opportunities to connect with the texts. For example, after a lesson on Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight—wherein students and I discussed the ideal of chivalry developed in this text
and how the text simultaneously challenges this ideal as it creates it—a student approached
me and shared their theory about the homoerotic potential of the gift-exchange game
between Sir Gawain and Lord Bertilak. They were excited to be able to have a conversation
about how supposedly modern ideas about gender and sexuality can also be found in
medieval literature.
Trust can also be established pedagogically by building opportunities for revision
throughout the syllabus. In particular, my syllabus includes a revision opportunity where
students can submit a revised paper with a short essay explaining their writing process for
both drafts. Not only does this relieve my students’ grade anxieties—opportunities to
improve are built in to the syllabus—but it also encourages students to think about writing
as a recursive process. As I explain to my students on the first day: writing does not end with
a “final” paper. Instead, you need to carry these lessons through to the next paper, the next
class, and grow as a writer in your respective fields.
While I encourage students to view writing as an important component of their
disciplines in all of my classes, it was particularly evident in my sections of Introductory
Composition integrated with Purdue’s Polytechnic College. Overall, this multidisciplinary
course integrated three first-year courses: Introductory Composition, Fundamentals of
Speech Communication, and Design Thinking in Technology. My fellow instructors and I
collaborated to interweave the classes and to emphasize the ways in which composition,
speech, and design practices inform each other. During my three semesters teaching the
integrated course, I found that the integration particularly fostered the students’
understanding of the applicability of English to their STEM degrees. For example, my first

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assignment is for my students to read Atul Gawande’s Checklist Manifesto and to apply
Gawande’s principles as they write a checklist of their own. To accompany this checklist,
students also write a short essay in which they examine their own writing process, explaining
how the audience, form, and medium of the checklist affected the final product. As a result
of this project, we are able to discuss idea generation as a long-term, recursive process.
Checklists must be written, tested and revised multiple times in order to be truly effective for
their users—and the same goes for a thoughtful paper or an innovative solution.
Interestingly, this project also provides a good in-road for students from majors like
Construction or Aviation, who were initially more resistant to the integration. By discussing
a genre that is common in their fields, I demonstrate the relevance of composition in their
daily lives. As one student stated in an end-of-semester reflection: “What I learned from the
integration of Tech and English was that, despite those being separate subjects, and the
classes themselves are pretty dissimilar, everything can be related to each other. This can be
applied in the outside world with jobs and careers as well. Something you learn in one class,
while sometimes can seem pointless in the moment, will be actually beneficial and it might
be useful in an area that seems unlikely.”
Although my composition students have benefitted from an integrated course with
collaboration from instructors in different disciplines, I do bring a similar approach to my
literature classroom by encouraging interdisciplinary thinking among my students. For
example, when teaching Jo Walton’s novel, Tooth and Claw, in a literature course on
“Dragons,” I focus largely on the death and funeral practices of dragon society evident in the
text. As I do so, the class and I discuss that, though the novel centers on the actions of
dragons, the work can be used to analyze and question many of our human social mores.
Given that the events of the novel are catalyzed by the problematic death of a family’s
patriarch, I begin with a brief discussion of the Ars Moriendi, and pose this question to the
class: if you were to write an Ars Moriendi for the dragons of Tooth & Claw, what would it
address? Many students drew in earlier conversations from Beowulf about weregild and the
body as treasure; concurrently, their classmates applied this notion to the importance of clear
wills and distribution of wealth. Thus, through this line of questioning, I encourage the
students to approach their knowledge of the text from a new angle. Simultaneously, the
resulting discussion also demonstrates how to use historical knowledge to analyze modern
texts. The students then display this knowledge in their answers to a following question: why
do the priests eat the eyes of the deceased? Their answers ranged from the broadly
philosophical (“The eyes are the windows to the soul”) to the mythological (“In Greek
mythology coins were placed on the eyes of the dead to pay Charon—maybe this sense of
payment is carried over here?”). Though the question itself is more geared towards gauging
students’ understanding of the narrative, the students’ answers revealed an eagerness to draw
on and apply a wider range of knowledge.
As a result of my classes, I want students to come to understand themselves as
authors and readers situated within larger literary communities. My goal is for the students to
become active and thoughtful participants in these communities, and I believe that this can
only occur through developing my students’ confidence in themselves as both readers and
writers. My teaching experience at Purdue has allowed me to strengthen my approach to
encouraging students of various backgrounds to see how English applies to their lives, and I
aim to bring this experience to all my classes that follow.