Teaching Philosophy

Christine Tracy
November 21, 2004

Loretta Conrad was my first memorable teacher. In her eleventh-grade English class at Mother Seton Regional High School for Girls I wrote a news story based the poem "Lord Randall." I finished the assignment early and so passed my story to a classmate, Patricia Dalton, who immediately started laughing. Noticing this exchange, Miss Conrad walked over, and I expected to be reprimanded for disrupting the class. Instead, Miss Conrad read my writing aloud with a big smile on her face. I would not feel that same rush of pride and pleasure about my writing for a long time. But praise did come. As he edited one of my feature stories, Mike Vertanin, a features editor for Albany Times Union, uttered the words we all long to hear: "You are a good writer."

These are just some of my academic, professional and personal experiences that inform my teaching practice. My primary goal is to inspire, motivate, and engage students with the course material. I teach writing as a process, the "how" in Journalism, and aim to meet students were they are as writers and thinkers and to take them to the next level. Somewhere between John McPhee's prescriptive style and Michael's Joyce's creation of a "rich confusion" is my pedagogy, which encourages experimentation and exploration within careful guidelines. (A yoga teacher beautifully describes this approach as "the place between comfortable and uncomfortable.")

I learned how to "show not tell" from Rensselaer's Professor Lee Odell, who taught me to reverse engineer large projects and to design assignments that instruct on multiple levels. In courses, such as "Writing for Print and Digital Media" and "Writing to the World Wide Web," a popular writing course conceived by doctoral students, I incorporated my own research interest into my pedagogy. For example, I assigned Scott McCloud's essay, "Show and Tell," and I asked students to create a Web page that taught their peers how to successfully combine text and images. The assignment offered both structure as well as creative space, and the results were impressive.

Finally, I believe that much of my growth as a writer and scholar will come from the challenges presented by my students, and I work hard to be conscious and prepared to ably address these challenges.

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Contact: ctracy1@ninthmuse.org