It also takes how my interactions with students have influenced the way I have been teaching for a long time. .
My personal experiences as an educator contribute largely to bringing about a change in my philosophy of teaching in which the most meaningful learning takes place when students are motivated and interested. It is my belief that the way to achieve this is by giving students a voice in the learning process, and by assisting them in finding connections in the curriculum with their own life and interests. Thus, "pedagogists", as Laurie Grobman (1999) maintains, " have turned to the resistance model, which proposes that we encourage students' appropriation of academic discourse to enable them to critique it" (432).1 By allowing students to bring their own stories, experiences, ideas, and critiques into the classroom, this provides the students with opportunities to work together, to learn from one another, and respect one another's differences-social and cultural.
Previous Experiences of Teaching .
My previous method of teaching was teacher-centered one in which, as is culturally believed and hence has been practiced in our part of the world, the teacher is a giver while the student a receiver, setting aside the voices of the students. Nevertheless, it worked out very badly as it gave rise to a sort of inertia and dissatisfaction among the students failing to voice their minds. And my changed philosophy of education, thus, concentrates on student-centered one. I believe in focusing on individual needs, and involving students in the process of their learning. I am very uncomfortable with the teacher-centered philosophy of perpetualism, in which multiculturalism and gender issues are evaded in the curriculum. Hence I see my philosophy of teaching reflected in and supported by the theoretical model of Mary Louis Pratt's "contact zone". .
A Theoretical Approach to My Transformation.
