Through my teaching, I aim to help students see themselves as agents capable of bringing about change via their written, verbal, and visual communication. In first year composition courses, this frequently means having students develop meta-cognitive awareness of rhetorical knowledge and apply it as we analyze and produce a wide variety of multimodal genres. Similarly, in professional writing courses, students learn to combine their content knowledge from other disciplines such as engineering or health sciences with writing and research practices in order to produce texts that impact various stakeholders. In general, the following concepts guide my pedagogy across each course:
Students come in to our classrooms already entwined into various engagements with technological resources. I tap into those entanglements and illuminate how technology affords certain rhetorical choices and forecloses others. For example, in class we frequently talk about how the same message would need to be altered due to genre and media constraints. A Facebook post is different than an email, which are both distinct from a text message and each must take context and audience into account before being written, sent, and/or posted. We use this discussion to springboard into a discussion of how communities utilize certain technologies and how in order to reach certain individuals, certain media must be utilized. In introductory composition courses, students choose their own media and genres in order to convey their message to audiences: Students remediate their research into podcasts, videos, speeches, and other forms of communication in order to reach their intended and secondary audiences.
In professional writing courses, we discuss the importance of learning new tools on the job. This frequently means having to dive in to new processes and communicative technologies and relying on various resources to learn how to adapt to these new methods. Students learn to work with such tools as Adobe Photoshop and InDesign in order to gain a hands-on understanding of design principles and to gain practice producing texts that will have an impact on workplace environments. In both cases, I hope to instill students with a sense of curiosity about new technological tools (for example, document design software, programming languages, audio or visual communication technologies, and so forth) so that they can continue to expand their available means of persuasion in whatever situations they will face beyond the classroom.
Frequently, students in my professional writing courses produce work for clients in the community. For example, in my healthcare writing courses, we have partnered with local food banks and elder care facilities to produce health-information materials which ask students in health-related fields to apply a range of writing, research, design skills to respond to a health-communication exigence. Students learn to conduct research specifically to learn about what methods and practices have been implemented in the past and base their projects off of those findings. As importantly, students conduct primary research by listening to what users have to say through interviews and usability testing in order to determine how their projects should be altered to better fit the needs of our partners.
Within first-year composition, students also engage in these rhetorical practices in order to convey information about a particular discourse community that they belong to or a specific issue that they are interested in to outsiders who may be unfamiliar with these particular points. Often, students use various media to reach different members of the class, but frequently, we have also partnered with other sections of introductory composition in order to create a larger community of learners who can learn together and provide feedback on each other’s documents in terms of writing and content. This collaborative context allows students to put their learning of writing, design, and research into practice by producing documents that are rhetorically sound—making brochures that are multilingual, using specific colors on websites for color-blind populations, and adhering to best practices for usability and information protection policies.
During the course of a semester, students learn a tremendous amount about writing and analysis that it can become easy for them to forget how much they actually know by the end of a semester. Asking students to periodically explain to me, themselves, or each other what has been meaningful, what has changed their thinking, and where they are struggling has helped students—and me as the instructor—to articulate what they are learning and how they are learning it. This frequently takes the shape of having students submit professional memos to me in professional writing courses wherein they explain what research and writing they are planning to do for their project within the next week and why they think this will be effective in meeting the needs of the assignment. In introductory composition courses, students complete periodic “theory of writing” reflections in which they explain how their understanding of what writing is and how it works has changed based on our reading and discussions. These documents provide a glimpse into the learning that goes on in the classroom and also gives students to talk about what they have learned about writing in specific, agentic ways. Moreover, I use my background in counseling to listen to what students are saying about their experiences as members of this community of learners and to adapt my teaching to fit their needs.