Statement
of Teaching Experience
and
Criteria for Assessing Collegiate Writing
From September 1994 to July 1996 I was employed as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Mediterranean University, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. With 15,000 students from 25 countries and faculty from 20 countries, EMU has become one of the largest and best-known English-language universities in the Middle East.
Living in North Cyprus and teaching at EMU were among the most challenging and rewarding experiences in my thirteen years as a university-level instructor. Students in the Department of English Literature and Humanities were mainly from North Cyprus, Turkey, and various Middle Eastern nations. English was a second language for most of them, although a number of the students grew up in Britain—the children of refugees who fled the political and military conflict of 1974 that resulted in the partition of the island into Turkish and Greek nations.
Our goal was to provide the same kind of liberal arts education that students would encounter at universities in English-speaking countries. Almost all of the Humanities faculty held advanced degrees from American, Canadian, and British universities. Our expectations regarding exams, essays, and other assignments were both ambitious and realistic as we worked to bring our students up to the university level. The challenge was compounded by the wide variation in the academic abilities and motivation among the students.
Effective teaching at Eastern Mediterranean University frequently required instructors to go through a difficult reading with the class one sentence at a time, listing and explaining any unfamiliar words. I produced written study guides to assist students page by page, and sometimes I needed to explain difficult ideas in every sentence of a reading. This was a time- and labor-intensive task, but the results in terms of student comprehension were always evident and rewarding.
During the 1993-1994 academic year, I helped evaluate the writing abilities of first-year college and university students at schools in the Southwestern U.S. to determine whether the students were ready for the challenges of higher education. In our training sessions, I read and scored sample essays, assessing the skills of first-year students. By the end of a typical ten-day session, I had evaluated about 700 essays. The skills required for successful college-level writing were precisely those that I emphasized in my teaching at the university level—first in Canada, and later at Eastern Mediterranean University.
In both English composition and philosophy courses, I directed attention to specific arguments and reasoning patterns and proceeded patiently with each of my students. They said that the highly detailed study guides and lists of questions I provided made difficult texts accessible, and improved their confidence when they undertook more complex and difficult assignments. The study guides also proved effective in promoting lively classroom discussion and debate.
In teaching argumentative and expository writing, my goal has been to enable students to write essays that address the topic at hand in language and style appropriate to the level of the course. I collaborated with other faculty members and worked with my students to ensure that written assignments included the requisite amount of depth and specificity of supporting details. Basic exercises in logic and critical reasoning were included, allowing students to clarify the logical sequence of their ideas.
In Canada, most first-year students were prepared for their studies, though some required additional tutoring to meet new academic challenges. In most cases I undertook this responsibility myself, but referred some students to tutoring centers on campus. Many of my students from Mount Royal University (then a two-year institution) continued their studies at the University of Calgary, and I was glad to hear them report that their pre-university work with me had enabled them to grapple effectively with the requirements of higher-level study.
Damon Gitelman, Fall 2-15
