Teaching Philosophy

I see learning as a collaborative act one that includes conscious and unconscious aspects. My teaching is informed by cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), notably the work of Jody Shipka and Paul Prior. I think providing students with the opportunity to examine how their thinking is connected to their writing is important—not just what they choose to write but how they develop their own distinct composing process. I believe that students learn when they co-construct knowledge with others: when they encounter the unfamiliar and think through it with other people, texts, and technologies. The ability to connect and communicate is, therefore, one of the most important learning tools, and I emphasize making this capacity accessible to all students in the learning environments I design. As a teacher, I see my role as a custodian of the learning space: I design, maintain, and sustain the scaffolding and infrastructure where students co-create knowledge through their investigation and conversation with other learners.

I encourage students to learn through their lived experiences and the texts they interact with daily, to help them find the learning potential in what they might see as mundane, everyday communication practices. I offer a variety of content that represents different ways of knowing and provides students with several access points for engaging with classroom concepts. I complement every academic, print-based text I assign with multimodal, popular culture analogs: videos, music, podcasts, images, and videogames. I also ask students to delve into the often unquestioned influences on their own thinking in a semi-structured, often visual, form. For example, in my introductory writing classes, I have students create influence maps where they include objects, experiences, and knowledges they consider foundational to their current thinking. In mapping out (among other things) the people, experiences, media, and places that are important and memorable to them, students can interrogate the lens through which they mediate their world. They begin to make critical connections between the various facets of their lived experience and erase the distinction between their everyday life and the academy. My classes encourage students to rhetorically question power relations inherent in meaning-making and to understand their role as rhetors and composers in this process.

As a teacher, I think it’s important that students consider how technology shapes their composing. I make space for students to consider how technologies are integrated into our everyday communicative practices, and how their affordances and constraints nudge us in often unseen ways. Working through the new media ecologies they are immersed in requires students to demystify technology, to observe the conceptual similarities newer technologies have to older technologies. It is also important for students to defamiliarize from their writing process, to takes risks that help them to notice the important composing decisions they have normed and habituated to relative invisibility. I think an important part of encountering the unfamiliar is exposing students to various kinds of composing, a much richer conception of what writing is and what kinds of “texts” it produces. I encourage students to take risks with their compositions by asking them to experiment with multimodal projects that take on forms of their own choosing for their own determined audiences. One way I facilitate this risk-taking is in my intermediate writing courses where I have students remediate their final research projects for non-academic audiences. In experimenting with different representations of knowledge, students become more attentive to the connections between audience and delivery; they consider how well their chosen compositional forms attend to audience-specific needs.

In emphasizing audience attentiveness over mechanical correctness, I frame composing as a process which reflects a relationship between a composer and their audiences—some intended, many others unintended. Across my introductory, intermediate, and upper-division courses I have students complete a “Director’s Commentary” for every project, an informal textual, audio, or video reflection where they describe their project’s rhetorical design, its intended audience, and their compositional decisions in implementing it. I find that providing students the opportunity to explain their compositional practices in an informal form frees them from the anxiety that limits their risk-taking. This allows their conversations with other students in the classroom to focus more on the effectiveness of their compositional choices and less about arbitrary notions of correctness. This complementary assignment also reorients my role from that of a critic of a final product and more toward a guide in their composing process and growth as a writer.

I see assessment as a conversation with students about their learning. The marginal comments and formative feedback I provide students on their work is the beginning of a larger conversation that continues into our on-on-one conferences as well as the classroom. While I provide feedback in marginal comments on smaller assignments, formative feedback on unit projects, and one-on-one writing conferences, ultimately students are co-constructors of the learning environment and I build opportunities for them to shape the classroom experience. Just as I provide students various types of feedback on their writing, I build in various ways for them to give me feedback on my teaching. I have students complete post-unit check-ins, which are voluntary and anonymous digital forms that ask them for feedback on their experience in the class: what readings and assignments resonated with them in addition to how they are feeling about their progress in the course. I use this feedback to make immediate and long-term adjustments, identifying small tweaks that can be made to the day-to-day experience of the class but also larger changes to consider in future iterations. Students also have direct input through project rubrics, a tool I created for my Technical and Professional Writing Course to facilitate discussions about project exigencies. These rubrics are collaboratively designed with students, encouraging them to reflect on their priorities and values as writers as they determine the assessment categories and their point value. I find that providing students opportunities to engage with course design through assessment not only increases their investment in the course itself, it also helps to clarify expectations that they have for me as their instructor, themselves as learners, and each other as colleagues.

Students arguably learn just as much from participating in the operations of a learning space as they do from their interaction with its content. In focusing on their own composing process and the learning process encapsulated in the course itself, students are better equipped to identify and reflect on their learning and growth as thinkers and communicators well beyond the confines of the semester long courses where we collaborate with them.