Katy Lewis is a graduate teaching assistant and Ph.D. student in the English Studies program at Illinois State University. Check out our alumni interview with Katy! 

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What is your current position? 

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I am currently starting my second year as PhD student in the English Studies program at Illinois State University, focusing on children’s literature. I work as a graduate teaching assistant, and I have taught freshmen composition (ENG 101, ENG 101.10) as well as Writing in the Academic Disciplines (ENG 145, ENG 145.13 [focused on business writing]). In Fall 2018, I will be teaching Foundations in Literature for Children, and, through the Spring 2019 semester, I will serve as the ISU’s Writing Program ENG 101.10 Coordinator, a position that oversees the part of our instructor orientation responsible for preparing and coordinating incoming master’s students as consultants in our ENG 101.10 program.

 

How did your experience studying English education at Longwood prepare you for this position?

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I refer to my educational experience at Longwood all the time! And I know that, whether I realize it or not, I’m using what I learned at Longwood every single day. I think one of the biggest things I took away from my time at Longwood was not a specific technique or classroom activity. Instead, I feel like my Longwood professors exemplified as well as taught me how to be aware of and attend to the needs of others in the classroom atmosphere. The compassion that my professors had for me and for teaching has been instrumental in the how I plan my classroom. I’m always thinking about how I can engage students in writing and literature in ways that welcome them to the classroom. And, as I mention below, teaching is about reflection and about community, and they are all working together at the same time.

 

Can you identify one or two specific classes or academic experiences at Longwood that you feel prepared you to be successful as a teacher?

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What immediately comes to mind is student teaching. And, of course, student teaching is the biggest practical experience we have, but it wasn’t just the act of student teaching that was important. In fact, it was more than just going to school everyday and teaching. It was the reflective bit that is so integral to successful student teaching that I have found myself returning to over and over again. I may not remember many days of student teaching—what a blur that semester was!—but I do remember most of the observations I had and the feelings that I had when I talked with my professors afterwards. I remember the type of thinking that I needed to do to make my teaching better, and this idea of reflection—of taking the time to really understand what worked and what didn’t—is something that has stuck with me. Here at ISU, as I prepare to help incoming master’s students become consultants, I’m also thinking about all the things that I’ll need to do in the fall as they’ll transition to becoming instructors in the spring. And I truly believe reflection—metacognition!—is so important to successful teaching. In fact, many of the conversations in my classes at Longwood revolved around stories or memories of different teachers or educational experiences. I was also fortunate enough that one of my fellow English student teachers was in the same school system as I was, so we often talked about our days and reflected on how things went. We also had to observe one of our fellow student teachers teaching and talk with them afterwards, and it felt so cathartic to talk with someone about your struggles and successes.

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Reflection ultimately became for me not something that you, as a teacher, do in a room at home by yourself. Teaching, reflection—they both necessarily involve community, and I was so lucky to have found that at Longwood. So, if I had to pinpoint the two things that I valued the most from my educational experience at Logwood, I think it would be the teaching community and the reflective attitude about teaching that Longwood fosters. It’s really unlike any other.

 

What advice would you give young people interested in teaching English?

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First, yay! That’s so exciting. English is such a wonderful subject.

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And then, when people tell you the humanities aren’t important (which in a time of extreme focus on math and science), tell them that they’re wrong. Tell them that students deserve to read and write stories of all kinds, especially those about themselves. Tell them that teaching English is more than just telling someone to put a semicolon there or add in a conjunction here so they can avoid that taboo comma splice. Tell them that teaching English is about communication, about writing to express and persuade and inform but also to enjoy for the sake of writing itself.

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And, finally, know that not everyone may love reading and writing as much as you do. And know that your job isn’t to get them to love those things as much as you do. Instead, you should be fostering in them some appreciation for the subject that is inherent in themselves. Students should be making themselves happy, too, not just you.

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