We open the first movement with a collection of three teaching philosophies that unfold the story of my pedagogy during my time at FSU. As is typical with the first movement of symphonies, this movement adopts sonata form: the philosophy (Philosophy 1) penned in my opening semester is marked as the EXPOSITION that lays out the teacher I strive to be; the philosophy (Philosophy 2) revised in the wake of global lockdowns due to COVID-19 becomes the DEVELOPMENT of my pedagogy as I adapt to online practices; the final philosophy (Philosophy 3) composed in my closing semester acts as the RECAPITULATION that reflects and forwards my prior philosophies and my current research interests.

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Philosophy 1—the philosophy written during Summer C of 2019 for Dr. Dominguez’s “Teaching English in College”—is expository in nature by the fact that it leans so heavily into prior knowledge. While I did not explicitly draw upon composition theories in the writing of this philosophy, I did find myself enacting a typology of prior knowledge that Kathleen Blake Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak identify in their fourth chapter of Writing Across Contexts (2015): assemblage. I came to FSU with the primary intention of furthering my study in multiculturalism. And, being almost completely unfamiliar with the overwhelming amount of material presented to me as an incoming graduate student over the course of six impossibly short weeks, I found myself retreating back into spaces I had been comfortable in when tasked with constructing an ambitious, cumulative portfolio at summer’s end. My identity, then, as a multicultural and multiracial individual became the force that unified my initial philosophy through an advocacy of celebrating individualism and voice in the classroom; the various pieces of knowledge I did retain during this brief period became grafted on to the assemblage of multiculturalism I established for myself.

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Philosophy 2 is written in reaction to two significant exigencies: COVID-19 and writing transfer. Among the two, the pandemic is more straightforward, triggering a significant pedagogical shift from face-to-face to online instruction. Unsatisfied with the way I had handled the final weeks of my first semester teaching (and the opening weeks of global lockdowns), I was grateful to have the opportunity to take Dr. Neal’s “Online Writing Instruction,” which gave me both the time and space to develop a more realized pedagogy better suited to online practices. However, my second philosophy also uncovered how my time in Dr. Yancey’s “WAC-Transfer” had been a significant site of learning that shaped how I approached composition classrooms. Unlike my first philosophy where I relied heavily on prior knowledge, writing transfer as an overarching goal of first-year composition became a foundation for which I could build and develop my pedagogy on as a first-semester teacher.

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The recapitulation of Philosophy 3 manifests the most clearly in the preface where I forward the particular elements from Philosophies 1 and 2 I find to have sustained relevance. Individualism and voice are still aspects to encourage and celebrate. Writing transfer remains the ultimate goal of the course. What separates Philosophy 3 from its predecessors is that it articulates the way I see the course unfolding through three elements of sonic rhetoric—dwelling, resonating, and recording. In unpacking this trajectory, I understand this to be an abbreviated form of the concepts entwined with attunement in the seminar paper I wrote for my directed individual study “Space, Place, and Sound in Rhetoric and Composition,” the fourth and culminating movement of this e-Portfolio. As I learned from Yancey et al. and my own initial philosophy, prior knowledge has a powerful presence in a site of learning; students enter the classroom with dispositions they’ve built from prior echo chambers. But the classroom is also a site of learning that—through dwelling, resonating, and recording—has the potential to become an echo chamber itself that influences disposition. Therefore, despite its ordering in this e-Portfolio, this third and final philosophy aims to recapitulate the idea of echo chamber presented by my seminar paper.