Teaching Philosophy

Teaching is a rhetorical act. Good teaching requires not only helping students understand content but also convincing students that what we are teaching is relevant and important to them. To do so, teachers must actively instill values in students that encourage them to look for connections between classroom content and their lives beyond the classroom. Students should see how what they are learning can apply to other classes, future careers, and their digital lives. If students are not able to reflect, analyze, and connect, they run the danger of welding content to the classroom context—unable to use new knowledge in situations beyond the space where it was learned. To break these welds, my classes actively focus on cultivating connections through reflection and application. I want my students to see writing that they do with me as part of a larger constellation of writing they do throughout their lives. I want them to see that writing they as important and relevant. I want them to learn to become life-long learners and their own best teachers.

Active learning requires actively cultivating connections. Because of this, all of my classes challenge students to build bridges between classroom content and other contexts. Students need to explore what they already know, what they are doing concurrently in other contexts, and what they plan to do in the future. Building these bridges requires critical reflection. From first-year writing classes through graduate seminars, students in my classes are asked to think, talk, and write about what they are learning when a new objective is introduced. They continue this reflection as we build on what they know and as the learning objectives are met. I especially encourage students to connect what we are learning to their co-curricular and extra-curricular writing. For example, in my first-year Writing & Rhetoric I class, we begin by introducing a major writing assignment that asks students to analyze a discourse community that they are already a part of, such as an organization, a club, a fandom, or a part-time job. When students first get the assignment, we break down what they already know about this specific discourse—and about discourse in general. We explore the ways that various discourses make meaning through language, symbols, gestures, sounds, and other means. By the end of the exercise, students see the ways that meaning is made in a familiar discourse and the ways in which they are already experts in their chosen discourse. We continue this reflection as they engage in class exercises, draft their project, and revise. As the assignment wraps up, we apply this learning to other contexts. Students explore how analyzing this discourse can help them analyze other discourses, such as new classes they join, the discourse of their major, or the discourse of their future career. We then move directly into an assignment which requires them to join a new discourse so that they can apply what they have just learned. This movement from reflection to application is reciprocal and takes place through the whole curriculum. Part of this process is explored in my recent article, “What Reddit Has to Teach Us about Discourse Communities.” The takeaway from this article and from my pedagogical approach is that engaging students with regular reflection and active connection to contexts beyond the assignment allows students to apply what they have learned to contexts beyond the classroom more effectively.

Part of this application beyond the classroom means encouraging students to connect classroom practice to their digital lives. Digital literacy is an important part of modern writing. Some of my classes focus on digital texts explicitly, such as my graduate seminar Digital Literacies or my undergraduate course Composing in New Media. But even in courses such as Writing & Rhetoric I or History and Theories of Composition, students explore writing as a practice that is deeply embedded in digital practices. We explore how most writing is digital and includes elements beyond text: images, charts, graphs, hyperlinks, etc. Even font choice, spacing, and formatting convey meaning. In essence, all texts are multimodal—using more than one mode of communication at the same time to convey meaning to readers. I encourage students to make use of all of their available means of communication when writing. For example, in my junior-level Writing about Culture and Society course, I ask students to create a pop culture text. They must first determine what message they want to get across to which audience. Many students choose to persuade fellow students to act on an issue. Students then work out how best to reach that audience. Rarely is their message text alone. Often, students determine the best methods involve making videos, creating posters, posting on social media, or making other digital content. The format is not pre-determined for students, so they must justify their choice of format to me as part of their assignment. They must explain how the digital tools they have used will effectively persuade their audience to action. Similar flexible assignments are present in many of my other classes. In Writing & Rhetoric I, first-year students persuade local policymakers to take action on an issue important to them using digital texts. In New Media Composition, graduate students create texts that use new media to forward their scholarly goals. I encourage my students to see digital writing as just a part of the continuum we use to persuade through written text. Of course, exploration of digital texts involves the same kind of critical reflection and cultivation of connections discussed above. Students connect their classroom writing to writing they are doing outside of the classroom. I want students to see all of the writing they do—in and outside of school, in digital and non-digital formats—as part of a broader spectrum of semiotic practices. By creating a broader theory of writing that includes a wide range of writing practices, students can make use of these semiotic practices in multiple contexts. I cover why digital and multimodal writing is important to writing pedagogy in my articles such as “Digital Writing, Multimodality, and Learning Transfer” and “Gaming Reddit’s Algorithm.” At the heart of my pedagogy, I strive to encourage students to connect writing across contexts so that they can use what they are learning in one context across many others.

In essence, I am attempting to equip my students with a set of practices that they can rely on when exploring written practices outside of the classroom. I want them to know how to approach new writing contexts when they encounter them. While they may not be familiar with the discourse of the next context or its genres, they will know how to break down the context mindfully and approach writing within the new context critically. I want my students to build habits that will turn them into life-long learners so that they can become their own best guides to new learning. When students leave my classes, they are not only better able to understand the content, but they are also better able to connect that content to their own lives and to continue to learn even when the class is over. They learn to become their own best teachers.