SYLLABI
ENGL 15 – Rhetoric and Composition
ENGL 210 – The Process of Writing
ENGL 202C – Technical Writing
ENGL 473 – Rhetorical Approaches to Discourse
ENGL 471 – The Rhetorical Tradition
 
STUDENT EVALUATIONS
ENGL 15 – Rhetoric and Composition
ENGL 210 – The Process of Writing
ENGL 202C – Technical Writing
ENGL 473 – Rhetorical Approaches to Discourse
ENGL 471 – The Rhetorical Tradition
 
TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Even though an individual name may be headlining a text or an individual’s fingers may be animating a keyboard, I believe that the act of writing is social. Writers are always already positioned in some place in some time in some relation. There is no solitary author. Writers are not the sole inventors of their prose, enabled by genius. Writers are constantly in negotiation with audiences, who influence, impact, and co-construct their writing. In short, writers are collaborators, writing collaboratively.

These postmodern theories inform my teaching. I follow a post-process pedagogy in my student-centered classroom, designing writing projects with an eye toward the public, rather than an internal, expressive gaze. At the start of the semester, my students and I discuss writing processes and how these processes are recursive. Students then reflect upon and share their process, while learning the process of others. I encourage students to use writing courses as an opportunity to explore a new process, or a piece of a process, that will stretch their way of thinking and writing. As we go through the semester, students evaluate their writing process contextually after finishing each writing project. One of my goals as a composition teacher is to help students gain ownership of a writing process that they can take with them into their future college courses and careers. Additionally, I find that the more students reflect and evaluate their writing process the more invested they are in their writing, which often leads to more thoughtful, insightful, and critical prose.

The content of my courses are in line with post-process’ social turn, meaning I emphasize the importance of knowing and reaching audiences. Students are instructed to be aware of and to shape their prose according to a constellation of genre, discourse, and rhetorical conventions. In doing so, their messages have a better chance of being communicated. More often than not, however, students are used to writing only for their teachers-as-audience, and so this critical skill is either lacking or underdeveloped. Therefore, I usually steer my courses toward a “real” audience. Students are asked to look toward the community, find people and places where their writing could have an impact. By “going public” with their work, students are compelled to write. This exigency, I believe, helps make their writing purposeful and engaging, as well as provides them with the opportunity to develop the critical skill of reading and reaching audiences.

For example, at the start of my first-year composition courses, students locate what communities they belong to, what roles they have in those communities, and what issues circulate through those communities. They then locate an issue they wish to engage with and design a plan that attempts to bring about social change. Throughout the semester, students collect primary and secondary research on their issue and maintain a blog where they post their findings and the arguments made available to them by their research. At the end of the semester, students design and send or perform a “text” to an audience of change-agents in their community before assessing its rhetorical effect. I find that designing writing projects that expand the boundaries of the classroom to include a public component prompts students to ask tough questions, develop critical thinking, and make meaningful connections between their academic work, real world issues, and their local community.

My instruction, which asks students to think and write outside of the classroom, also challenges students to consider an appropriate ethos for certain times and places and sets of circumstances. As a result, my students gain a respect for difference, from ideas to practices to people. My role as a composition teacher, I believe, is to encourage this learning, awareness of audience, negotiation of ethos, and reflection on process, so that students continue to develop as thinkers and citizens through their writing.