Representing Ourselves Through Syllabi: Do We Say What We Mean?
Kathleen Maloney, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Literature and Composition
St. Mary’s University
E-mail: kmaloney@stmarytx.edu
When I think back to my favorite classes as a student, I rarely remember the course syllabi. Instead, I remember favorite readings, challenging tasks, important lessons, professors’ personas, or fellow classmates. Still, the syllabus is a valued artifact of what we do as college professors. What do our class syllabi say about our selves, our classes, our expectations of our students, and our idea of the university? How is it that this one document comes to speak for us in so many ways, and should it? As professors, our role within the university community is both that of object and subject. We are quite literally one of the things that our universities sell to prospective students. At the same time, we are individuals who have to consider our own subject positions in order to make decisions about who we are as people and as professors. Often, students sign up for and sometimes drop our classes without knowing us or only knowing us by reputation, which is frequently the same as not knowing us at all. Sometimes students make this decision after the first day of class, after having seen us or, perhaps more realistically, after having seen our syllabus. In addition to defining our teaching philosophies, our syllabi define our role within the university, our university, and our students.
Given all of this, I have started to wonder what my syllabus says about me. I have had to write and revise my statement of teaching philosophy recently; I realize that I define myself as a student-centered teacher, that I encourage learning through questioning, and that I sometimes focus a little too much on my role in the classroom. I believe that classes need to remain flexible and change depending on the interest and ability level of students in a class, but how do I write this into the syllabus? If I write my syllabus with the idea in mind that my students will want to learn, do I also have to take into account those who don’t want to learn? I teach predominantly general education courses—specifically introductory level composition and literature survey courses—where some students cannot believe they could learn anything.
In exploring this topic of syllabus design and its connection to teaching philosophy and personality, I find that I ask far more questions than I can answer. I also find that in my own teaching and thinking about teaching I have underutilized this powerful teaching tool. In this article I explore what teaching considerations and teaching philosophy might be identified in a syllabus. In part, this reflection on teaching philosophy immediately identifies a problem – that we may not all define syllabi in the same way and that our individual definition of the syllabus and its components is chiefly related to our pedagogy. What we may consider to be a “common sense” approach to the syllabus and what sections to include on a syllabus is really deeply imbricated with our sense of what it means to be a professional. And perhaps by our imagined sense of what it means to be professional derived from observing our own professors more often than any specific, formal training. Not insignificantly, our relationship to the syllabus is also intimately tied to the audience and purpose for which we write the syllabus. I cannot be alone in imagining this is not the best method for explaining course goals to students on the first day of class or for proving that learning outcomes are being met, and yet these are just two of the formal uses of the syllabus. Ultimately, I work to show here that what our syllabi contain speaks to our teaching philosophy and that teaching philosophies change as we learn about ourselves as teachers. What we might learn from examining our syllabi is that we imbed a number of assumptions about ourselves, our students, our fields, and the institution, and that we might not spend enough time thinking about these assumptions and how visible they might be to our students when they read our syllabi.
One problem with the syllabus is that it is supposed to serve too many needs simultaneously; the syllabus is written for the teacher and student, but it is also written for the institution, sometimes the state, the accrediting organization, the department, and the world (if it is on the net). In addition to this concern about audience, concerns about purpose also arise: is this document meant as a legal agreement, an institutional one? Or is it more likely used as a guide, a suggestion, a possibility? How detailed or how open should a syllabus be, and what do these choices say about the person who wrote the syllabus or the course that the syllabus is written for?
First, I suppose it is important to consider what I mean by syllabus. I see it as a document given to students on the first day of class that, for me, in most classes, is a course outline listing class policies and procedures, kinds of assignments, grade percentage breakdown, and a tentative schedule of due dates. I rarely feel prepared to map an entire semester for students I haven’t met, though for some teachers this course schedule is an integral part of the syllabus. Most guides to teaching, including those by Erika Lindemann, Duane Roen et al, and Malcolm Lowther et al suggest components that are necessary as a part of a syllabus: personal information, course goals, readings, assignments, instructional procedures, course requirements, schedule, grading / evaluation criteria, educational beliefs, methods of instruction, and learning facilities and resources for students. These components seem at first reading to be obvious, yet I can’t help but think I am not sure we would all agree what should be included for many of these components. Significantly, this may be where our teaching philosophies and personalities come into play when writing a syllabus. While the document itself is usually institutional in form or language, we all choose to define the above categories in our own ways and to use the syllabus to begin to construct our image of our classroom or our students. Therefore, each of the above components bears some consideration; here I will address contact information, course goals, and readings.
Contact Information
While I include contact information on my syllabus and understand its importance, and though I consider myself a student-centered teacher, I really am not sure that students should be given access to me twenty-four hours a day, so I do not publish my home phone number. In thinking about what options are possible, it seems to me that you can choose to publish your home phone number, your office number, your cell phone number, your email address—either the campus or home account—and your office location. In addition to listing this information, on the first day of class I tell students the best times to reach me at the university phone number and email address that I do provide. Still, students sometimes reply to the standard evaluation question about teacher’s accessibility with responses that would lead an outside observer to believe that I am difficult to reach; however, I am not sure I should be available at 2 a.m. when the essay is due at 10 a.m.
Course Goals
As far as course goals are concerned, I am never really sure what to include here. Are course goals really just my expectations for my students, a list of possibilities, things the student could accomplish if they chose to? I have many goals for my courses, but I have come to realize that as a teacher I cannot achieve these goals for my students. So most often, I use a course goal that sounds wholly uninspired and would likely be found in a course catalog. Additionally, course goals are often written for general education courses in the absence of the teachers of these courses and then handed to teachers to enact. In thinking about my generic course goals, I think I write them both as a kind of rebellion from the static goals that are written for me and because by writing “uninspired” course goals, I am describing the course rather than creating expectations for students I haven’t met. I do this because I want students to articulate their own goals for the course. I know that many students could use my guidance with creating these goals, but I also feel that some students stop working once they have achieved the stated goal; I find most stated course goals limiting for me as a teacher and for my students.
Readings
It seems obvious that we should include a list of readings on our syllabus, but frequently all that I include is a list of texts. Also, I know that I don’t even do this much for my composition students; many semesters, instead of assigning readings for these students, I ask them to choose the topics for their readings and to find these readings. In this way, my students are learning something about research and reading simultaneously. Our in-class discussions then focus on identifying writing styles, considering various research techniques, and analyzing different author’s arguments rather than a group discussion of the topic of what we have read.
Common Definitions and Individual Teaching Style
After examining contact information, course goals, and readings, we can begin to see how both our common definitions of these items, but also how individual teaching style and pedagogy begin to become visible on the syllabus. However, I wonder if this ability to read between the lines of a syllabus is a teacher-based reading skill or if our students can do this as well. Often when I hear students discussing teachers, I hear them make distinctions that fall along the lines of course difficulty or a professor’s personality. How savvy are our students at reading syllabi?
Additionally, how well do students read their teacher through the syllabus? We know that students and teachers see the world of the classroom differently; we also see syllabi differently. Laura Garavalia, et al in “Constructing the Course Syllabus: Faculty and Student Perceptions of Important Syllabus Components” conducted a study to find out what parts of a syllabus were most important to students and faculty. Garavalia, et al found that “the results of the study indicated that students did not attend equally to all syllabus components. Among the most attended-to components were exam dates, due dates of assignments, reading material or chapters covered by each exam, and grading procedures and policies” (Garavalia, et al para 4). While some of these are important for teachers, for institutional purposes, we also include the least important (according to this study) information for students, “titles and authors of textbooks and readings, course withdrawal dates, course information (title, section number), and the academic dishonesty policy” (Garavalia, et al para. 4). Perhaps students find these less important because these are the predictable pieces of information or because this information is available to students in a number of ways and through various sources.
This study of student and teacher impressions about the syllabus is additionally interesting because of the fact that these are not the only two audiences for a syllabus. So while teachers find this institutional information important, it is not so much for our students but for one of the other audiences of our syllabus. These documents also have legal and institutional purposes, and once we begin to consider the legal and institutional possibilities for our syllabus, we become aware that these purposes demand a much different control of language than is necessary for our students. Often this means we write course policies that go into excruciating detail about how many tardies are equivalent to an absence and how many absences from the course will be tolerated before the course grade will be affected. Though, at the same time, as teachers we recognize that any absence affects the grade in the class. We also know that we don’t uniformly enforce these policies but write them so that if we need to rely on them the language will operate without flexibility and “stand up in court.”
Should this be a primary concern for us as teachers? If these policies are explained to students in the university handbook, available to students in print and on the internet, do we need to replicate information on our syllabi? I believe that these kinds of legal and institutional concerns come between my students and myself on the first day of class as we are beginning to negotiate our relationship to one another. Still, even though I feel that including an attendance policy and plagiarism statement are reductive and repetitive, I often include them because of institutional pressures. Even when I haven’t included this information on my syllabus, I believe I should be able to expect that my students will come to class and do their own work. If they choose not to, they should face the consequences. I am quite sure that I haven’t cheated or misled my students by omitting this information; in fact, it seems to me that they should appreciate the honesty that I expect of them. Still, perhaps the middle ground is to include a statement that they have a copy of the student handbook or university guidelines and that they should read them. Because no matter how hard I try, I could not sound more stringent and legalistic than the university guidelines.
Community Building
In addition to struggling to make sure that the syllabus is serving both students and institution, teachers should also consider the act of writing or revising the syllabus as an opportunity for community building within a department. Through a discussion of the syllabus, teachers of the same course, but even those teaching different courses, can work to define with greater clarity their ideas about course goals, assignments, course policies, and their teaching philosophies. This act of sharing syllabi can also work to build the sense of the department as a whole, or it can show how little collective sense of a department there is. The syllabus could serve as a starting point for us to discuss what we mean by education, how we believe our department serves these overall goals, and how individual classes participate in this sense. A syllabus for a course can serve to interest students in our fields of study and, therefore, build community by including more students in our departments.
Purpose
Following this discussion of audience for the syllabus, we must also ponder the variety of purposes we have in mind as we write our syllabus. In the preface to Preparing Course Syllabi for Improved Communication, Malcolm Lowther, et al suggests that “syllabi were designed to communicate course information and instructor views of the courses to the student” (Lowther vi.). While I suppose this to be true, how many of us allow the document to do this on its own? On the first day of class, in addition to handing out the syllabus, we read over parts of it to stress their importance. In doing this are we shortchanging or undermining our own syllabi? In addition to undermining the document, what does this behavior suggest about our students? I know that I define myself as a student-centered teacher, yet on the first day of class I read them a document I am quite sure they can read on their own. I feel like I am especially guilty when it comes to this first day of class behavior. I hand out the syllabus and read over sections; often I add in disclaimers or make adjustments to the policies verbally. I am not really sure why I do this, though I suspect it is likely because in nearly every course I took as a student, the professor read the syllabus on the first day of class. Also, I know that I leave things out of my syllabus on purpose so that I can discuss them with students on the first day of class. And in reading the syllabus aloud to my students, I take away any sense of urgency that my students might otherwise feel about reading this document on their own; still, I can’t help but feel frustrated when students ask me questions which can be answered by this document, yet why should they read the syllabus if I spend class time to review it?
While serving as a means of communication, which I potentially undermine, the syllabus has other purposes. For example, Ken Matejka and Lance B. Kurke in “Designing a Great Syllabus” identify “four primary functions of syllabi: (a) providing a cognitive map, (b) establishing a contract between instructor and student, (c) acting as a device for communication, and (d) conveying the instructor’s plan for the course” (Matejka and Kurke para. 3). We have already discussed a number of these potential purposes, yet the one I find fascinating is the idea that my syllabus could serve as a cognitive map. I wonder which parts of my syllabus highlight for my students the cognitive map or if this element is there at all. I teach general education courses, and largely in my introduction to composition classes I am not sure that students see the intellectual challenges present in the syllabus. I construct a system of freedom and responsibility for my students which allows them to learn at their own pace and in the areas that they have the greatest interest. However, I suspect when they see that they don’t have to buy a textbook for the class because of my individualized learning plan, they don’t see the cognitive possibilities. I am also not sure that we can realistically expect first year college students to understand cognitive mapping at their stage of development.
In keeping in mind our question of how the syllabus highlights our sense of selves as teachers and our teaching philosophies, we must also acknowledge that not all of the purposes for a syllabus work together to assist us in the construction of ourselves as teachers. The expectations for a syllabus often undermine the possibilities for showcasing our teaching philosophy and classroom style, yet as a communication device, the syllabus is not entirely limited. In “Developing Pedagogies: Learning the Teaching of English,” Shari Stenberg and Amy Lee argue:
Often we think of syllabi simply as pragmatic documents, which act as a contract between teacher and student: this is what the course promises; these are the requirements you’ll be expected to fulfill. Instead, Amy worked to demonstrate how the construction of a syllabus is an important pedagogical act, with the document serving a significant pedagogical function. In the syllabus, the teacher works to constitute her ‘teaching self’ in relation to a group of students she has as of yet only imagined. It can be read, then, for the (implicit) assumptions it makes about who the students are and what they are thought to need. Syllabi often further indicate not only what students will need to acquire or do to successfully engage in the course, but also what kind of students they are expected to be”. (Stenberg and Lee 332)
And yet, what the authors of this article admit is that frequently our syllabi work against the pedagogy that we profess. Still, this raises important issues. How can we possibly understand what our students’ expectations for a course will be until we meet them? Yet, when we enter the classroom for the first meeting, students have come to expect a fully outlined version of the course. And certainly our institutions expect this. While I am not sure these decisions were conscious on my part, I think that perhaps this concern about showing up on the first day with a fully outlined course does interfere with my sense of myself as a student-centered teacher. This problem of when to hand out the syllabus or how the syllabus functions in my course is likely why I have made many of the decisions I have made about the syllabus: the brief course outline, no attached schedule of what to expect each day, and the side comments I provide to show my students how to read what I have given them.
Given the multiple audiences and purposes for this document, it is understandable that we struggle with feeling the need to actually revise syllabi. Once written, this document seems to be working if there are not problems called to our attention by any of the people who read it. Still, perhaps one way to empower this document and ourselves would be to actually teach students how to read a syllabus and read between its lines. This goal seems easy enough to fit into my courses which teach critical thinking, reading, and writing; however, as Gregory S. Jay argues in “The Discipline of the Syllabus,” “baring the device of the syllabus would at once announce the goals of the course and put them into question, making for a critical and reflective relationship of the students to the goals of the course” (Jay 103). If students learn to discern how syllabi are constructed and how to read their teachers by reading their syllabi, this could work to the benefit of students, teachers, and universities as syllabi would have to be refined. It would point out that “the teacher in the classroom works within a complex force field of power and human relations that do not neatly convert into clear-cut decisions about how to produce democratically equitable space in the classroom” (Himley 13). It would call into question the role of the course in general education and the university, the political and personal intent of the teacher, and the students’ responsibilities. Nonetheless, these kinds of changes cannot be considered lightly, as it would take some of the valuable class time to work on syllabus reading and critiquing skills, and the type of reflection necessary for teachers to reconsider their pedagogy is not readily integrated into already crowded schedules. Changing how we think about our syllabi may even force us to reconsider other of our teaching practices and could lead to a greater opportunity for the community building referred to earlier. Perhaps we will even come to change this first day of class syllabus presentation, and instead consider using the web for syllabi so that we can gather information from students and make revisions to syllabi with greater ease.
Even if the syllabus is serving its communicative function well, should I work on revising it as the semester progresses so that students understand that class planning is a work in progress, that ideas are flexible, and that their input is important? Or do these kind of considerations depict a teacher who is indecisive or weak. I teach my students the importance of writing as a work in progress and that revision is a valuable part of the process, yet I infrequently revise the syllabus for them. When I make changes to the syllabus, they are generally date changes, class cancellations, or class re-locations. Additionally, these changes are generally done verbally, just like my first day of class emendations to the syllabus. Still the Garavalia study of student and faculty impressions of syllabi found “only one item fell below the neutral position … for both groups [students and faculty]… ‘Nothing in the syllabus should be changed once the semester begins’ -- indicating that students and faculty members prefer a somewhat flexible syllabus” (Garavalia et. al. para. 13). Perhaps I underestimate my students’ willingness to participate in creating a class that will work for them. This isn’t entirely true, as I do ask students to write reflections about the class throughout the semester and do make changes to the course based on these reflections, but never in writing or in the form of a revision of the syllabus. In teaching my students about education, I try to reveal to them their control in the process while I write and revise courses taking into account their suggestions—but I always make these more substantive changes to subsequent semesters. Ultimately, teaching my students to recognize their power and to help them see that they can make a class that works for their learning goals and styles works best with the students who are invested in learning. Still I am not convinced this will work for all students, this revision and workshopping of the syllabus can be read in a much less positive light. And I have had students who felt forced into taking these general education requirements and felt that my asking for their participation in creating the course was inappropriate or too much to expect of them as students.
My thinking about why and what I include on the syllabus depends on what kind of class I am teaching. If I am working with first year students, the syllabus is often sparse, in part because I feel like a multiple page syllabus can be overwhelming when you are taking five or six classes in a semester. With all of the policies and due dates to negotiate for each of your classes, multiple page syllabi may be daunting. Or perhaps these multiple paged documents are impressive, maybe this is part of what students consider necessary for the course to be considered challenging. The longer the syllabus, the more value a class has. Howard B. Altman and William E. Cashin, on their collaborative webpage, “Writing a Syllabus,” suggest “two criteria in deciding what information to include. First, include all information that students need to have at the beginning of the course; second, include all information that students need to have in writing” (Altman and Cashin para. 2). Clearly there is both a reference here to the possibility of overwhelming students, but there is also reference to the syllabus as a legal document. Still there is not a singular view on this topic as Lowther, et al argue: “An effective syllabus explains to the students the rationale and purpose of the course as well as the course content and procedures” (Lowther, et al vi.). This is a seemingly simple response. Of course, you should explain course content—though when I consider this, I wonder if it is possible to really know course content on the first day if you are attempting to teach a student-centered course. And is this question of the representation of course content similar to my earlier voiced concerns about course goals? I am left wondering if this simple directive to explain course content is really as simple as it seems and if it is possible to verbalize course content before meeting our students. Realistically, an introduction to composition class changes significantly from semester to semester, depending on the experience and ability of the students in the course; many times the course focus shifts widely from editing concerns to organization models to the finer points of research depending on the students in the course that semester.
Yet, I know that the more I consider and work on a class before meeting my students, the better able I am to guide their experience in the course. Often this contemplation and research before a class begins reveals itself in the extended course syllabi. Catherine Rainwater describes her experience in teaching one course with extended time to prepare in her article, “Comments on Course Syllabus: Identity and Otherness in Film and Fiction,” where she suggests that “The hours spent putting together such a lengthy document were more than rewarded by a better teaching experience and, apparently, better learning experiences. Such a syllabus helps the high-achieving students to excel, and it helps struggling students gain focus and clarity” (Rainwater 133). She is not kidding when she describes her syllabus as extensive; she wrote a paragraph for each day of class meetings, explaining daily goals, questions for discussion, and writing prompts. I, too, see how spending more time preparing for a class leads to clearer course and daily objectives. However, I am not convinced this is a truism for the composition or general education course in the way that it may be for other subject areas. And I am not willing to concede that the only way to understand the depth of a teacher’s preparation for a course is visible in her extensive syllabus. Similarly, I am still negotiating how guided a student’s experience must be for it to be rewarding and result in achievement of course goals.
As a teacher of English, I teach reading and writing as a basis for instructing my students. Yet I wonder how evident this is based on my syllabi. What language and style is used for these documents? Does this style represent appropriate academic discourse or does it simply fulfill the institutional demands. How reader-friendly are these documents? I know that I use columns and lists wherever possible on my syllabus in order to simplify information and make it readily available for students. But I also know that I should sometimes include a citation or provide an expanded explanation on my syllabus and choose not to in order to preserve some imaginary ideal that white space is a necessary component of syllabi design. I think I sometimes choose aesthetic concerns about what the final product looks like over its content. And I know I don’t accept this decision of form over content from my students when they turn in work to me. However, I do expect that their work be visually appealing, though we rarely mention that in our in-class discussions about what constitutes “good writing.” Ultimately, perhaps my syllabus represents an example for my students of a writer’s struggle to balance the visual and psychological needs of the reader with concerns about how much information to include and how to organize it.
Along the line of this argument, it is interesting to consider the syllabus as a teaching tool with regard to style of writing and reading. So, should this document exist as a sample of “good writing” for students? And is this even possible for the syllabus to do with its multiple audiences and purposes? Instead, maybe I will begin to include a disclaimer on my syllabus that explains that this is the problem with writing to multiple audiences and for multiple purposes—you end with a document that is functional but not necessarily dazzling as an example of writing. Perhaps it is in our best interest to consider this goal more seriously. Isn’t it possible that in thinking about first-year students and upper division students we recognize that these two groups need significantly different kinds of activities and sets of rules for classroom behavior? We also know that these two groups respond to teacher expectations differently. So perhaps this is our justification for the fluctuating style of our syllabi. Perhaps this too is the moment that we begin building community with our students—when we recognize just how much we (purposely) leave unsaid on our syllabus and in our classroom. This may be the very reason that I resent being handed a set of outcomes for a course rather than having these left to my creation. We frequently make changes to our course upon meeting our students, and we leave large gaps in our syllabi so that we are not trapped into teaching the course at a lower or higher level than is necessary during any given semester.
Incorporation of Self in Syllabus
I think the most important consideration for me as a teacher is how well I can illustrate my love of my subject area. I know it is one of those ridiculous course goals that newbie teachers have—that their students will end up loving the subject area as much as the teacher does. But I hold on to this fantasy conception and really believe that my own enthusiasm, which is sometimes battered by the students, the other obligations that I have during the semester, and the number of times in a row I have taught a particular course really does make a difference to students and their perception of the course and area of study. Still, I am not sure that this love of reading and writing is evident on the syllabus. I suspect there are a few places that students may look for clues: the choice of texts for the course, the description of the course, the kinds of assignments, and, perhaps most importantly, in our own first day of class presentation of the course syllabi. I have never been good at reducing my first day of class attendance by being particularly mean or ornery on the first day of class. Instead, I am a little too excited by the possibilities that a semester holds, and this may be what scares off some of the students!
Still, this kind of reading between the lines to find myself in my syllabus is difficult. In her chapter titled “The English Literature Seminar as Writing Across the Curriculum”, Linda Peterson argues that “I could design a sequence of reading assignments and a sequence of writing assignments, but I found it difficult to integrate on paper my pedagogy as a writing teacher with my practices as a literature teacher” (Peterson 262). While Peterson is discussing a particular problem that faces writing teachers when they enter the literature classroom, I think her point is apropos here in that we all struggle to articulate our ideas about teaching, often in veiled or institutional language when it comes to our syllabus. In negotiating how what we do is informed by who we are, we must consider how our performance as teachers on the syllabus itself is articulated in a voice that we rarely use. Peterson raises another pertinent concern when she suggests: “It may seem that, by leaving decisions about the writing process up to the student, I merely avoided the issue of ‘content’ versus ‘writing process’ and that I partially acceded to the banking model of education by devoting most of my class time to the discussion of literature. Not necessarily” (Peterson 264). While we recognize that there are tried and true approaches to reading and writing that we must teach our students, I suspect that we often don’t include these in visible ways on the syllabus or in other course documents. Or rather, we include them but in coded language. When I suggest that students read a document, I do not mean that they should skim it once on the way to class but that reading is an involved process. Yet, I feel quite certain that I rarely spell this out to students in course documents lest they think either there is only one process for reading or that my annunciation of the process leads them to believe the course is somehow beneath/beyond them.
Ultimately, my ideas about teaching and learning are printed everywhere and on everything I touch. James Berlin states “A way of teaching is never innocent. Every pedagogy is imbricated in ideology, in a set of tacit assumptions about what is good, what is possible, and how power ought to be distributed” (480). This is, of course, true but is, nonetheless, not readily available to our students who often don’t understand that news reports contain bias. It seems to me that we must teach them how to read the documents we create for them if we want to empower our students to become better readers and writers. They learn this through experience; however, it may really aid in their (and our own) expectations for the course if they could, from the first day of class, ask interesting and challenging questions about the course content, learning objectives, and state their own expectations. Of course, we might have to change the way in which we teach or change our own expectations of students once they become educated about the process they engage in when they enter a college classroom.
Conclusion
Even though I find that this re-examination of my own process of syllabus writing has been helpful in my continued growth and development as a teacher, I recognize that realistically I, like many teachers, do not have the luxury of continually revising courses. Given the institutional pressure to subdivide myself in order to meet tenure requirements, teaching is only a small part of what I do. Additionally, I am not sure that this written document deserves the primacy in class. I continue to assert the importance of class attendance by making some information unavailable to students who do not attend – this is especially true of my feelings for students who are shopping at the beginning of a semester and cannot make it to my class during the first week. So I continue to leave some policies unstated on my syllabus, and I make a point of elaborating on or explaining some procedures on the first day of class. Still, I value student input and make changes to courses and syllabi during or after a semester where students who were especially engaged in the course provide me with suggestions for improvement. I find that my own learning strategies and study style become more outdated all of the time and that this student input becomes continually more valuable.
Finally, I think you can see who I am as a teacher from my syllabus if you read it well, and that this sense of me as a teacher is even more evident if you read my teaching philosophy in concert with the syllabi. Perhaps this is true because I have in some way designed these documents to be used together—first for my job searches and now for my tenure file. I feel that these documents work even better when read with other items in my teaching portfolio, including samples of student work and evaluations. That you need multiple documents to identify me as a teacher, to pinpoint my teaching philosophy, and to recognize the personality of my classroom is not surprising to me and probably follows the same logic that I apply to my students in asking them to compile portfolios. I don’t think I can make an accurate judgement about one of my students (or about many things) from a single document; I believe that context is important to understanding and that learning is a life-long process. Re-examining my course syllabi has allowed me to re-energize myself about courses that I teach frequently. Without re-examination, those classes have the potential to become rote, and I don’t want to be that kind of teacher.
References
Altman, Howard B. and William E. Cashin, “Writing a Syllabus.” March 3, 2003. http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/writesyl.htm
Berlin, James. “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” College English 50(1988) 477-94.
Garavalia, Linda S., John H. Hummel, Larry P. Willey, and William G. Huitt. “Constructing the Course Syllabus: Faculty and Student perceptions of important syllabus components” Journal of Excellence in College Teaching 10:1 (1999).
Himley, Margaret. Political Moments in the Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997.
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Lowther, Malcolm A, Joan S. Stark, and Gretchen G. Martens. Preparing Course Syllabi for
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Matejka, Ken and Lance B. Kurke. “Designing a Great Syllabus.” College Teaching
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Rainwater, Catherine. “Comments on Course Syllabus: Identity and Otherness in Film” College
Literature 21:2(1994): 132-142.
Stenberg, Shari and Amy Lee. “Developing Pedagogies: Learning the Teaching of English”
College English 64:3(2002): 326-347.
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