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Teaching
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Teaching Philosophy Statement |
As I think of it, inquiry describes our movements along the hybrid, snaking pathways laid out in the preliminary stages of a class. An inquisitive stance encourages us to seek insight with a high degree of agency, pursuing trajectories that mix what we already know with imagination, wonder, and a shared horizon of understanding. Rather than setting out with a limited destination in mind, inquiry tends to be open and responsive to intensities felt along the way. In this sense, inquiry is a productive method (a way of working) guided by processes of finding, conceptualizing, and meaning making, while drawing together a diverse mix of perspectives and materials. As a key consideration in my approach to teaching, inquiry is underscored in the framing of assignments and projects, in learner-centered activities and in various forms of collaboration that position students as participants in the shaping of knowledge. An example of this can be seen in "Writing Digital Spaces: Image and Map," an assignment sequence I developed for WRT302: Digital Writing. In this particular case, students inquired into design principles such as arrangement, layering, and juxtaposition to compose a visual composition. In this context, I was inquiring along with students, engaging in renewed questions about how to do things with images and words in combination. The unit was grounded in readings on rhetorical analysis, visual argument, and place-based documentary. Students created a variety of images and maps, which they produced using applications such as Photoshop, Tabblo, and Wayfaring. The unit culminated with an open gallery—a forum for bringing guests in on the compositions students produced. The gallery modeled the wandering aesthetic of an art reception, while students showcased their works and conversed about their processes, design choices, and future directions they imagined for their work. Conversation is a second activity that reoccurs across my work as a teacher, grounding the courses I teach and the habits of interaction I value. Conversation values the dialogical construction of understanding, insight, and knowledge with students and among them; activities of listening, sharing, and negotiating our emerging understandings are, therefore, foregrounded in the classes I teach. Furthermore, conversation is a meaningful activity that invests the learning environment with the voices of its participants, thereby opening the course to a more democratic forming of priorities, interests, and shared pursuits. To extend conversation beyond the classroom, I value conferencing with students, whether in face-to-face sessions, by e-mail, or by instant messaging, and I often reiterate not only the importance of such sessions for learning but also do so in an effort to sustain an open, flexible, and accessible role as the teacher of the class. Students in WRT307: Advanced Writing Studio: Professional Writing, for instance, worked in small teams to plan and produce a multi-genre collection of documents that would address some pre-defined need or problem for a hypothetical business. Attention to the series of tasks at hand frequently shifted from full-class conversations about particular genres and small-group and one-on-one explorations of the more contextually specific considerations. By creating room for conversation on multiple scales, students were able to learn the generic constraints and affordances of particular classes of documents while also reckoning those limitations with their own unique business models and scenarios. The interdependence of inquiry and conversation is evident in collaborative projects students have developed. A third essential activity in my teaching is writing. I am trained as a compositionist, as one who takes seriously the combinatorial demands of assembling discourse for a variety of purposes, including tacit and focal learning (i.e., noesis), making and creating (i.e., poesis), and the compelling, persuasive, and performative expression of ideas (i.e., rhetoric). Very simply, writing matters. For all of the courses I teach, writing is intrinsic—a productive, symbolic action that is deeply entangled with learning. Depending on the class, writing projects range from informal, spontaneous responses and explorations, to highly interconnected writing in digital platforms, such as weblogs, from lists of questions or annotations of readings to more formal, polished, and sustained pieces of academic research and argumentation. Inquiry, conversation, and writing might at first seem like simple ideas for characterizing my teaching, but I find that they are profoundly basic—foundational even —to the teaching I do, whether face-to-face, online, or some combination of the two. Furthermore, rather than taking these simple ideas for granted, by keeping them in mind as I develop and teach courses with varied content orientations, I find that my work consistently reflects larger values I embrace related to rhetorical education, practical experience with multiple discourses, and lasting habits of research and invention. |
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ENGL516: Computers and Writing: Theory and Practice (Winter 2012) |
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Selected Teaching Evaluations |
ENGL328: Writing, Style, and Technology (Spring 2011, EMU, 32620) (PDF)
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