Teaching Philosophy

 

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My primary goals as a teacher are to prepare socially conscious writers for a variety of contexts, both within academia and beyond. To that end, then, I create courses that unpack the many ways that writing is political, both through building rhetorical awareness and by exploring the potential of multimodal texts. 

 

In order to equip students to enter the diverse rhetorical contexts they will encounter, I must first give them the tools to analyze those contexts. All of my courses ask students to consider key rhetorical concepts and theories, such as audience, genre, and rhetorical appeals, not just in the texts they consume, but in the texts they produce. I carefully scaffold every assignment so that students have time to analyze and understand genre conventions, to practice some of the most effective rhetorical moves for their specific context, to critically read and respond to their peers’ work, to revise with rhetorical effectiveness in mind, and to reflect on their composing process and rhetorical choices. While the process is rarely this tidy or linear, I firmly believe my primary responsibility as a writing teacher is to give my students as many tools as I can to prepare them to understand and participate in the many rhetorical situations they will encounter in their academic, professional, and civic lives.

 

Although my courses engage with classical rhetorical theories, I do so with the intention that my students will push at the boundaries of rhetorical practice and consider new possibilities for communication. In any course I teach, I introduce multimodal texts because they challenge traditional epistemologies and offer new opportunities for meaning-making, especially for students who learn in diverse ways. I encourage a robust understanding of multimodality that includes, but is not limited to, the digital, and continually ask students to both analyze and compose in as many modes as possible throughout the writing process. In a typical course, students will examine texts as widely varied as music videos, activist websites, and political campaign posters, and may compose hand-drawn renderings of arguments, Twitter accounts, or even flyers to post around campus. Presenting these texts as worthy of serious inquiry helps my students to understand the vital role that multimodal composing technologies play in contemporary rhetorical practice.

 

I want students to feel confident to enter any new rhetorical situation, but the reality that writing is always tied to power often complicates my objective. Thus, I often prompt students to reflect on the ways in which writing—in any medium—is itself an exercise of power, and ask them to participate in and even contest the discourses that may disempower them or others. When teaching an academic research essay, for example, I explain how academic discourse often functions as the alienating language of a privileged few, which helps students understand why they might have difficulty accessing it, how they might enact it responsibly, or how they might use their rhetorical expertise to contest exclusionary discourses. In my Digital Rhetorics class, for instance, the first assignment of the semester is a reflective digital literacy narrative. In it, I ask students to track their relationship to writing technologies, and they quickly discover how often the ability to effectively compose in new media technologies is tied to issues of access. At the same time, I also share my own literacy narrative and reflect, with my students, on how my embodiment enables and constrains my access and literacy. Doing such work is crucial not only to model how to be a critically reflective writer but to establish an ethical, reciprocal relationship with my students. 

 

Through these approaches, I believe that I help to shape effective, reflective, and ethical composers prepared to contribute to a range of rhetorical contexts now and in the future.