When you have the chance to learn, take it without question. Don't try to fit it into what you think is your prescribed life plan. Take that opportunity and ride it as far as you can. When you get off the train, look! It will be there: a necessary part of your journey, neatly in its place, for how it got you here. 

My teaching evolves alongside my own learning and growth. I began my library science and instructional design studies recognizing that educational systems often perpetuate supremacist ideologies and histories of oppression, which students navigate in their lived experiences. Education and learning counter and deconstruct these systems. As such, my teaching philosophy goes beyond collecting creative instructional materials and co-constructing crystalized knowledge to providing the emotional support to hold others' stories. Meaningful relationships that communicate content through valuing students' stories support students in developing an education-focused mindset that complements a life. 

Accessibility and inclusion are not just theoretical concepts for me; inclusion is integral to creating a learning environment where students feel valued, heard and important for their perspective. I will always reflect on how to be more inclusive and more receptive of the emotional and cognitive dimensions of learning. This iterative design-thinking approach to teaching and learning permits continuous adaptation and deepening mutual respect.

I aim to foster a classroom atmosphere where students and teachers are both learners and contributors, engaging in a shared journey. I genuinely believe that we make an egregious mistake in our curriculum development separating out gifted students from 'special education, disabled' students in our instruction to implicitly assume in that categorical structure that disabled students and students in special education, low incidence programs with developmental delay cannot be gifted. As a librarian and instructor, I aim to differentiate instruction in inclusive classrooms to meet all students' learning and emotional needs. I will maintain high professional standards to ensure all students are held to high expectations while receiving the necessary support to discover their aptitudes.

As the wall hanging above my high school guidance counselor's office astutely noted, "Everyone is gifted; some just open the package sooner."   

By approaching our expertise with humility and openness to feedback, we can apply librarianship's principles of cataloging and metadata to reshape oppressive categories that have been created. This approach allows us to provide learning opportunities for all students, each with a gift of their own.

Research in deafblindness instruction and assessment uses a term, perceptual guidance between teacher and student to describe how children interact with the world. As Gregerson (2020) describes,

"We closely interact with, and partially direct, a child’s exploration without instructing the child into culturally similar ways of exploring. Perceptual guidance has two facets. The first is a bodily dimension where child and partner interact so that they create a joint bodily orientation to the world. The second is that partner and child show each other ways of organizing their overlapping perceptual field with arms and hands. This showing bears close resemblance to how we judge and discuss aesthetic matters. As in aesthetics, there is not a given correct procedure for exploring and judging, but an effort at creating community through showing each other how we experience the world. This gives the child access to the social world without purporting that this is the only correct way of exploring."

While this concept originally describes how a sighted adult might facilitate a deafblind child's engagement with the world, the metaphor extends beyond this specific context. It outlines a shared learning journey where both students and teachers contribute to the educational process. Across learners, there will be overlapping perceptual fields, and we, as the professionals apt to organize information, are charged with differentiating instruction and building connections. A librarian offering perceptual guidance provides diverse opportunities for perception, synthesis, and conclusion, without prescribing a single truth or correct approach.

Instead, I aim to understand what systems influence how we perceive truths and learning and education, with ever the openness around how we interact with the world with the agency to make meaningful differences, so long as we do. 

 As I continue to evolve as a writer-librarian-educator, I remain committed to adapting my philosophy to reflect new learning in a life that is always a draft.

My first draft of my teaching philosophy is included on this page as an artifact, written in Nicole Pagowsky's course in the Summer of 2022, as a reminder to myself to make it my avocation to always be a beginner at something.