TEACHING
Critical Relational View of Rhetoric
I believe the purpose of rhetoric and composition education is to help us become more engaged and reflective citizens, communicators, and community members, more capable of critical thinking and better able to understand and interact with lives different from our own. The study of rhetoric and composition, therefore, asks us to pay attention to relationships: between different groups, experiences, texts, and perhaps most importantly, between ourselves and the people we speak to, with and about. The video to the left (from the movie Waking Life) I think helps to explain my understanding of language as relational.
Courses Taught (select syllabi linked)
Gender, Culture, Representation | ENGL 20223
Introductory Women and Gender Studies/ Humanities Core course that explores how gender is portrayed in cultural texts across a range of genres and introduces students to theories of representation. Students examine the relationships between media representation, political representation, and historical representation related to gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, class, and disability (and the ways these concepts overlap).
Themed required second-year writing course asking students to analyze and compose arguments about media’s impact on individual and group identity. This course explores strategies for using internet media to compose our own identities and challenge how people see different groups.
Themed Intermediate Comp: Rhetoric, Media, Identity | ENGL 20803
Themed Intermed Comp: Rhetoric, Dating, & Romance | ENGL 20803
Themed, required second-year writing course asking students to analyze and compose arguments about dating, romance, and marriage. This course explores historical and modern constructions of familial and intimate relationships, with a focus on the ways that shifts in language connect to shifts in practices and beliefs. Click here for syllabus.
Themed Intermed Comp: Performing Civic Argument | ENGL 20803
Themed required second-year writing course asking students to explore "news" argumentation and to collaboratively research, compose, and perform a specific type of documentary “news” theater. Students choose specific contemporary issues on which to focus their group’s scripts and characters are meant to represent groups/persons impacted by the issue (past examples explored environmental concerns, sexual and domestic violence, and widespread pharmaceutical use and misuse). Click here for syllabus.
Intermediate Composition: Writing as Argument | ENGL 20803
Required second-year writing course focused on argumentative writing and composition. The three units in this course look specifically at data, evidence and fallacies; multimodal and narrative argumentation; and discourse and subconscious cultural argumentation.
Introductory Composition: Writing as Inquiry| ENGL 10803
Required first-year writing course focused on writing as a form of inquiry and analysis. The four units in this course look specifically at personal writing, profile writing, discovery writing, and argumentative writing. Click here for syllabus.
Reading & Writing in an Academic Context (TA) | ESL Requisite Course
Required course for students who qualify for placement through an online aptitude test. As Teaching Assistant, I met with all 20 students in one section of this course for one-on-conferences about each of their four major papers.
Defining Literacy
Aligning with James Gee and many others, I believe the real mark of literacy is being able to interact with different rhetorical situations, requiring different kinds of language-engagement (not just the kind common to classrooms). I believe imparting this perspective is crucial, because, rather than asking us to measure our language abilities against one system of academic or professional communication, it allows us to begin to see the many rich, complex ways language connects us with different people and groups in different parts of our lives.
Teaching Philosophy Abridged
In addition to Gee's definition of literacy described above, my pedagogical approach has been most shaped by critical literacy studies, environmental and process-oriented pedagogies, and Lev Vygotsky's writings on the zone of proximal development. I believe that my primary job, as a rhetoric and composition instructor, is to create a classroom environment that is conducive to an exploration of relationships, discourses, and recursive composition processes. To create such an atmosphere, I employ the following strategies (and believe them central to my teaching style):
Problematize/ question everything except the value of engaging different perspectives. My courses ask students (and myself) to approach our own assumptions and beliefs, and the assumptions and beliefs of others as both potentially problematic and also valuable -- through a lens of both doubt and belief (Elbow).
Make room for non-traditional rhetorical academic engagement. In alignment with many feminist rhetoricians and critical pedagogy scholars, I believe that educators must work to validate, not only traditional but also non-traditional forms of understanding and expression (multimodal, narrative, collaborative, embodied).
Prioritize process clarity and engagement over product expectations. I have found openness in product-expectations and clarity in process-expectations to be especially productive in the rhetoric and composition classroom. Students have commented that my assignment prompts felt “strange” at first, but ultimately helped them to “think outside the box” and created “a valuable and unique experience.”