A picture of me and my children, Lily and Will

Welcome to my website. I am Dr. Alan P. Church, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at Brownsville. This site is designed and maintained primarily as a pedagogical tool for the benefit of my students, although in the future I hope it will include material reflecting my scholarly activities and interests in rhetoric and medieval studies. For those of you new to this site and to the University of Texas at Brownsville, this is a brief introduction to the university and my place within it.

I find that many students presuppose that I am like what they imagine most professors to be, someone born into a position of some privilege. To begin, I would like to dispel any misconceptions to that effect. I grew up poor and fatherless, supported into my late teen years by a mother who cut hair for a living. I am the youngest of her eight children, two of whom died in infancy. My mother never earned a high school degree, but she did her best to provide for her children until we could provide for ourselves. It might surprise you to know that I am also a high school drop-out and that I began my post-secondary education at community college. I paid for my education through doctoral school out of my own pocket with some assistance through grants and loans. So, you can imagine I have much in common with many students served by this university, even though I am an Anglo. As for my professional life, most of my experience (almost all, really) has been as an educator of a diverse group of economically underprivileged, first generation college students. This I will talk about in more detail.

My teaching career began in 1988 when I became a Latin teacher at a high school, filling in for a teacher who was on maternity leave. Since 1988 I have taught over 300 credit hours at the undergraduate college level, 30 credits at the graduate level, and the equivalent of 30 credit hours at high schools or in special programs. Most of my early experience as as an English teacher was at the community college level, but even my experience here at UTB is classifiable as such because it is a hybrid institution that is part university, part community college, and most of my teaching here has been with undergraduate students in the core curriculum. The students I have taught have been a diverse group, including the mostly Hispanic students I serve now (more than 80% of the students here).

My most basic responsibilities at UTB have required me to teach four courses a term, ranging from remedial writing to composition and literature for the core requirement and upper division and graduate courses for our English majors; often I have taught five courses a term. I am also expected to maintain an active research agenda, which I have done, but it is an ongoing frustration for me and many of my colleagues that we are not given enough time to engage in scholarly activities of the kind and to the extent that we would like to have. To put this in some perspective, professors at first tier and many second tier schools teach one class for every two, three, or four classes a professor in my circumstances teaches, leaving us little time to pursue our scholarly agendas. Like professors elsewhere, professors here also serve on various university, college, and departmental committees. At times, I have served on as many as six committees, chairing two of them. In spite of these various commitments, teaching remains--as it ought to be--my greatest responsibility.

Teaching so many courses of developing students and students with differing levels of proficiency can be difficult, but I have tried to provide the students with the best education possible; in the end, that is all we can do as teachers--try--and if we don't try, what right have we to call ourselves teachers?  My desire to teach my students has required me to learn who my students are, to understand their strengths and their weaknesses, and to adapt my teaching while maintaining high academic standards that fit varying needs.

When I first arrived at the University of Texas at Brownsville (UTB) in 1999, the percentage of new students requiring remediation was around eighty percent, although most recent figures are around sixty percent. A survey of students graduating in 2003 revealed that sixty-two percent had taken at least one developmental course. Statistics such as these may vary among our colleges and universities, but they are probably higher at UTB because it is an open enrollment university serving first generation college students, many if not most of whom are non-native speakers of English, the language of instruction. But the underlying story here as elsewhere is the same: today's college students are not as well prepared as the students of yesterday; they require instruction in basic skills that we can not assume they possess. This presents a variety of challenges that are atypical of traditional higher education.

I teach a range of courses from developmental writing to graduate studies, but the bulk of my teaching load has been a world literature course which is part of students' core humanities requirement. A prerequisite to this sophomore course is successful completion of English composition, but beginning in the first semester I taught the course I learned that the students, who include freshmen as well as juniors and seniors, are typically lacking reading and writing skills that are supposed to be foundational prior to their registration for the course. At first I assigned students traditional essays and research papers, but soon I realized these assignments were not accomplishing their intended purpose, which was to teach students to appreciate literature and think and write critically about it. Compounding the problem for most students is their lack of cultural literacy. They do not possess the necessary background information to appreciate and comprehend what they read or what I attempt to accomplish in class activities, discussions, and lectures. Having assessed the problems and my responsibility, I have set out to find strategies to teach them in such a way that I could begin to remedy some of these deficiencies and create a challenging yet stimulating learning environment which will help them achieve the desirable student outcomes of the course--obtaining knowledge and skills necessary to understand what they read, literally and figuratively, processing that information critically, and expressing themselves clearly, critically, and creatively. As a result, I have found myself challenging some conventional and comfortable ways of teaching, and I began clarifying how I could make the subject matter and ideas associated with the course more accessible, creative, and enjoyable for me and my students.

Although my core teaching philosophy remains the same as it was when I arrived at the university, since I have been here it has evolved to reflect the needs of our students. It is useful for professors to remind ourselves of who our students are and what kind of students and graduates we want them to become. The fact that our students possess varying degrees of reading and writing proficiency further influences pedagogical approaches to teaching them. Rather than stick to comfortable teaching strategies that I had developed over a decade of teaching before arriving here, I began to assess the needs of students in the contexts of the different courses I was teaching while keeping in mind the educational goals outlined by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) and English Department policy. This has led to modifying my pedagogy and developing course methods and materials to help build foundational skills. I have attempted to create in my classes an active, diverse learning environment consisting of conceptual and skills-based group work activities and out-of-class assignments; focused discussions using the Socratic method; general discussions of course content; and lectures and explications of texts to develop listening and reading fluency.

From a curricular standpoint, I have sought to influence the integrity of the program in English from the undergraduate to the graduate level by developing courses and clarifying or establishing policy through service on committees like the English graduate, curriculum, and language and literature committees. Much of my course development has also derived directly from a research agenda that modified my initial interest in historical literary scholarship to embrace composition pedagogy in the rhetorical tradition. Rather than remaining detached from the classroom, this pedagogical approach to my scholarly interests has left its stamp on the how I teach and the material I use to do so.

The newest member of the University of Texas system, UTB is a challenging place to be a professor. Many of my students are first generation college students from financially disadvantaged backgrounds. Like students elsewhere, they must balance their studies with active personal lives, familial obligations, and work. We are constantly urged by administration to retain our students, something we agree with in principle, but the reality of the situation is that all our efforts are in vain unless the students themselves are motivated to make the most of the opportunity presented to them. They must learn study skills where none existed before. They must learn that college is a job deserving as much discipline and respect as the job that earns their wages. They must learn to be college students.

I maintain high standards for students and I have a reputation for being a demanding professor. My students' success is very important to me, but that does not mean I measure it the same way many of them do. I must measure it in terms of the knowledge they acquire, the skills they develop, and the process by which they begin to become lifelong learners. Although I am frequently frustrated about lacking the time to work more agressively on my own research projects, I propose that all who visit this site bear in mind the following truths: universities are supposed to educate their students; professors are at universities for the students, and not the other way around; but professors ought to lead the students, not "serve" them.