teaching statement
In the late 1990s, I found myself working in the computer industry by day and teaching by night; soon, my day job became nothing more than a way for me to support my teaching habit. After several years, I decided to make teaching my priority and have never looked back. Over the past eleven years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with a variety of students (“at risk”, ESL, undergraduates, reentry and graduate), at a variety of institutions (community college, state college, and university), in a variety of settings (classrooms, computer labs, one-on-one tutorials, and distance education). And, while the students, institutions, and settings change, I have found that there are three basic tenets that always inform my teaching: first, teaching and learning are collaborative practices; second, all writing is inherently rhetorical; and third, writing and technology are inexorably connected.
For me, teaching is not so much about course content as it is about student outcomes. Rather than structuring my writing courses around the memorization of grammatical rules or writing formulas, I work with the students in my classes to help them learn how to think critically about texts–those they read as well as those they write. Too often students have learned to be passive consumers of texts, and, lacking the skills necessary to question stances taken by writers, they simply accept text as truth. In turn, the texts that students produce tend to simply parrot back these “truths.” In my courses, I seek to make students more aware of the consequences of writing and language. We work together to explore the discourse communities to which they belong and to think about how composition and consumption practices impact those communities.
While I may begin each semester as the proverbial receptacle of knowledge, I consider my classroom successful when this is no longer true. Although I do not subscribe to the theories of decentralized classrooms as advocated by Paulo Freire–which argue for the complete removal of teaching authority–I do see my roll in the classroom as a facilitator rather than a dictator; I believe a course is successful when students move to the center and become active creators of knowledge and ideas. This is true collaboration: students learn from each other as well as from me, and I learn from students.
I’ve also tried to make connections between my academic research and teaching practices. As a scholar, my work examines the rhetorical practices of texts and argues that these practices determine form as well as content. From medieval manuscripts to the latest Flash animations, I believe that all texts are persuasive and have a rhetorical purpose: “everything’s an argument” (Lunsford). These beliefs, in turn, inform my teaching practices. I continually challenge my students to think about what composing a text means in this late age of print. All of my writing classes include a series of reading and “writing” assignments that require students to rhetorically analyze textual, visual and hybrid texts. In an effort to connect academic writing with the texts students encounter outside the academy, I cull readings for my courses from both academic discourse and pop culture. Some of my writing assignments also require students to create such hybrid texts. For example, in a recent course, after reading several articles about the rhetorical structures of illuminated manuscripts, students were required to illuminate the lyrics of one of their favorite songs. Later in the semester, three of those illuminations, along with print and video versions of the songs, were used as course readings and became the basis for one of the major papers of the semester that required students to perform a rhetorical analysis of both the text and the medium. By using both academic and nonacademic texts in my classes, I encourage students to recognize the rhetorical strategies inherent in all texts. Rather than learning static modes of writing that are often only relevant to other core humanities courses, this approach allows students to trace rhetorical practices across boundaries from everyday life to academic work and from English to other disciplines.
Since many of texts students read and write in my courses are electronic, technology also plays a core role in all of my classes. Unfortunately, the ubiquity of technology can cause it to become invisible to writers and its effect on writing often goes unnoticed by students. Rather than simply using technology because it is there, I seek to problematize it by encouraging students to examine how different technologies effect how we read and write texts. While discussing course readings I continually call the students’ attention to the technologies used to create particular texts and ask them to think about the rhetorical implications of those technologies. Then, because I believe that technologies, like writing, must be practiced to be mastered, I ask students to explore the rhetorical implications of writing technologies by completing several technology-based assignments and projects. These projects have taken various forms over the years in various courses: composing individual web texts in a basic writing course, developing a collaborative online journal in a business and technical writing course, designing experimental texts that included multiple media in a special section of freshman composition for Art and Design majors, and creating Photoshop collages, time-based media arguments, and Flash texts in new media theory and practice courses.
Whether teaching basic writing, freshman composition, technical writing or mutlimedia I seek provide students with opportunities to develop and strengthen the rhetorical skills they already bring with them into the academy and into my classroom. By foregrounding the material practices of writing in all my classes, I require my students to examine how various technologies shape textual practice and, ultimately, shape their discourse communities. Thus, it is my goal as a teacher to foster in students the ability to not only produce various types of critical texts, but to be able to question and critically analyze the various texts with which they come in contact on a day-to-day basis.
To see some of my syllabi, assignments and sample student work, please visit my online teaching portfolio.