Dr.
Lorraine Gilpin
Associate Professor
Teaching and Learning
Background and Philosophy of Education I was born and raised in Portland, Jamaica, where I received my initial teacher preparation and taught Social Studies until I immigrated to the United States in 1993. Amidst challenges and possibilities in the United States, I entered Georgia Southern University in 1994 and have been here in capacity as undergraduate student, demonstration teacher, graduate student, doctoral candidate, instructor, assistant professor, and now associate professor. Prior to a faculty position at Georgia Southern, I taught fifth grade students in Liberty County where I still reside. The core of my philosophy of education was formed as one of nine children living in a tenement yard in rural Jamaica, and it has been solidified with passing years: The fundamental purpose of education is to transform lives and the environment in which those lives are lived. Then, it meant a ticket out of poverty and a chance to improve the quality of life for my family. Now amplified, it means that education holds transformative potential for individuals, groups, and society at large and carries ethical and social imperatives. This belief in the transformative potential of education, along with my orientation toward the scholarship of teaching and learning, form the basis of my teaching. Teaching is more than helping students learn a discrete set of content, methods, and skills. Teaching involves helping students understand the value of education and make connections across the curriculum as well as to their lives as individuals, members of groups, and members of society. I strive to engender in students respect for and development of both the affective and cognitive aspects of teaching and learning. As such, I encourage them to examine what they (as well as their own students) bring to the teaching and learning setting and to identify those attributes that are assets and which ones need to be turned into assets. I encourage students to reflect upon and inquire into teaching and society. I see my role as that of bridge builder. In that role, I help students make connections or bridge gaps within and across courses; between theory and practice; between their lives and their students’ lives; and between school and society. In one of the undergraduate courses that I teach, Methods I Practicum, I am especially able to facilitate these connections. I help preservice teachers to better understand themselves and their roles by establishing peer feedback groups or preservice teacher commons. Within the commons, students exchange ideas and support each other in their development as teachers and help them understand teaching as less isolated and private than it appears. Participation ranges from brainstorming classroom management ideas and teaching strategies together to formally observing and providing feedback on each other’s teaching. At
the graduate level, I strive to support P-5 teachers in their teaching
of Social Studies and ESOL. While we revisit theory, the focus is
on application in the context of their classrooms or ones to which
they have access. Here, I help them focus on meeting the needs of
diverse learners while integrating the curriculum and reflecting
state and national standards. Among other things, I expose students
to a range of strategies from which they are required to select
and use some in their classrooms. They then share insights into
those strategies with their peers. During this portion of the course,
my role is truly that of facilitator, helper, and troubleshooter.
Next year, I will teach two courses, Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and Advanced Seminar in Teaching and Learning, which I designed for the Teaching and Learning Doctoral Strand. I am excited about these courses as they are infused with the transformative potential of education and SoTL. Description of Various Teaching Strategies My teaching strategies bring together the strengths of the direct instruction (often necessitated by limited resources) to which I was exposed in Jamaica and the learner friendly approaches that I have learned in the United States. As such, the nature of my teaching is guided reciprocal with the varying degrees of responsibility for teaching and learning between the students and me. I strive maintain clarity on purposes, strategies, content, and assessments. When I make clear to students where we are going and give them the tools to participate in getting there, the students are better able students to take responsibility for and ownership of their learning. To this end, I use guiding questions on the syllabus; make notes, activities, and study guides available (electronically) to students; model activities and strategies and open them to critique; and use assignment description and rubrics to make expectations clear to students (the rubrics help bring about greater alignment between what I expect and what students submit). I also place emphasis on some brass tacks of good teaching in any context: using effective questioning techniques, varied kinds and levels of questions, appropriate wait time, and scaffolding. At the undergraduate level, my content and methods are intricately woven as I teach methods courses and often the method is part of the content and the content part of the method. My graduate courses are applications based. For example my graduate social studies methods course is designed on a model I call RIA, which utilizes reflection, interconnections, and application. I came up with this idea after realizing that nearly all my graduate students are students that I taught in my undergraduate Social Studies classes. Thus, I focus the curriculum around the integrated curriculum and differentiated instruction and help them use the theoretical perspectives to inform specific practices for their individualized and immediate teaching context. Although individualized, there is a lot of exchange of ideas and adaptations on ideas by members of the class. I believe that modeling is my best strategy. I model the dispositions and knowledge of the profession for students. I show respect for different points of views (but demand support) and model respect for inquiry into teaching and learning. I am enthusiastic about teaching and hold high expectations for my students as I do for myself. My modeling carries over into the strategies I use and the things I do in the classroom. I often teach elementary lessons, like my students will be expected to teach, and open myself up to critique even letting students evaluate me with my own rubrics. |
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Lorraine
Gilpin