Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Last Updated: 31 Oct 2007
When it comes to teaching, I admit to being a bit skeptical. I’m not quite sure if people can be taught complex, dynamic arts such as writing or rhetoric. I am confident, however, that people can learn, and that they learn primarily through experiences. Pedagogically, crafting experiences that call for students to help formulate questions and goals and to research and analyze audiences, contexts, and histories as part of a dynamic inventive process.
Technology: All Writing is Technological, All Technologies Restructure Thought
Following Walter Ong, I consider writing a technology; I do not think it surprising that teaching technology involves many of the same challenges as teaching composition: people claim to lack any natural talent, are intimidated or unassured, or want give up at the first sign of difficulty. As with writing, however, if you can push them past this initial difficulty, then the sense of accomplishment justifies any amount of labor. When teaching writing or new media, I aim to have people work on self-articulated goals and projects. I have referred to this approach as “object-oriented” instruction: the point is never to learn a technology or technique, rather it is to create something relevant and necessary to the student's life (be that personal, professional, or scholarly). This goes for all levels of student: from freshman to graduate. By structuring personalized assignments, I help students realize relevant and tangible successes, the keys to building the investment and confidence necessary for life-long learning.
Rhetoric: An Art of Reflective Decision-Making
Whether I am presenting web design, document design, or academic research, my primary goal involves increasing my students’ awareness of the rhetorical choices they make during the composition process. My courses in first-year composition, professional writing, and new media present writing as a strategic engagement with particular audience(s), contexts, and histories. To document student decisions, writing projects are often accompanied by a reflective pieces focusing on how the student researched and addressed the values of their intended audience. For instance, my multimedia writing projects are accompanied by “postmortems,” briefs that explore what went right, what was the most frustrating part of the composition, what research the project required, and which particular design decisions the student is most satisfied. Such reflection stresses the ways in which technological issues of usability, accessibility, and sustainable are rhetorical decisions.
Audience: Rhetors Responsible for Real Audiences with Response Ability
The networked nature of our contemporary communicative environments call for a rhetoric based less on authority and more on cooperation. Since audiences are only a click away, students need to be prepared to write with people rather than to people. Thus, taking responsibility for how texts might be received by diverse audiences surfaces in all my courses. My Professional Writing students are required to work on service learning projects--to work with real clients outside of the hypothetical safety of the classroom. My Visual CoOperative Project asks students to interpret the work of previous students and to compose for the CoOperative, knowing that their contribution someday might likely be the object of another students analysis. My multimedia writing students craft potential contributions to David Shea's CSS Zen Garden, an ongoing exhibition of standards-compliant design. I am to make students comfortable, knowledgeable, and productive netizens, with an appreciation for diversity, an ethical disposition toward others, and the critical and communicative tools necessary to participate in a liberal democracy.
Scholarship: Introducing Students to the Parlor
Given my theoretical interests in co-habitation and cooperation, I frame audience in terms of Kenneth Burke's famous parlor metaphor. The metaphor stresses to students that knowledge is produced agonistically, through dialogue (and, hopefully, trialogue, quadalogue, etc.). Also it helps students deal with the anxiety of entering into a discourse community as structured and hierarchical as academic discourse. In contrast to students' feelings of inadequacy at not knowing everything, I use Burke in an effort to frame all writing, even academic research, as a social, collaborative endeavor. Everyone offers a unique perspective to contribute to the discussion. Such a theoretical framework informs the many blogs, forums, wikis, and social bookmarking technologies I use in all my classes to frame learning as a collaborative, yet agonistic, process. It also shows up in my "letter to the Dean" assignment for first-year composition. The assignment calls upon students to write a letter to the Dean of Students concerning Academic Freedom. Students learn how to use their position as students, novice members of a community, to positively frame the value of their perspectives. This approach to ethos allows students to credibly enter into academic and political discussions without having to adopt the voice of the authoritative expert.
Rhetoric and Composition as Risky Business
Finally, I aim to help students embrace mess and risk--what I consider two essential elements of rhetoric and composition. I try to set material in front of students and let them decide where to take it. My research questions are always open ended, if they can even be called questions--often I will ask them something broad such as "why is the internet important?" and force them to define their topic, to follow their own leads. Such an approach can frustrate students unused to developing a meaningful question and who feel better prepared to deliver a specific answer. Such an approach can also be frustrating to me as a teacher; I can find it difficult to hold back "suggestions," to let students find their own path. On my end, it involves resisting the urge to give them the right reading (or the Right reading of a reading). But eschewing the easy path (a desire to teach) in favor of developing critical awareness and fostering intellectual curiosity (a desire for learning) moves us toward a more inclusive and participatory conversation of humankind.