Teaching Philosophy

I love to teach and I love to teach writing. Throughout graduate school, I have had the opportunity to teach a wide variety of courses. With each new course I teach, I start to see more clearly what I value and what I believe about teaching. What follows is a description of three core concepts that define and drive my pedagogy.

Students as Unique Individuals

I see each of my students as a unique individual. Part of each student’s identity comes from their race, socioeconomic status, beliefs, sexuality, and cultural background, but each student is ultimately more than the sum of these facets of their identity. Each student deserves to be treated in a way that honors their individuality and supports the goals they set for themselves. In each class I teach, I try to incorporate assignments that allow my students to focus on projects they want to pursue and skills they want to develop. The assignment sheet I’ve included from my English 309 document design course is an example of one of these assignments. Topics and projects for this assignment have varied widely including the following examples: a student who volunteered for a large homeschooling convention, worked with convention organizers to redesign the event website, program, and promotional materials; a computer science student who created a web design toolkit and instruction manual for computer science professors to help them create more useable and attractive course websites; a student who worked part-time at a pizza restaurant and was in charge of training new employees wrote, designed, and tested a training manual to help new employees fill out complicated order tickets correctly. As a teacher I strive to create a learning environment where students can talk about and work on things that are important to them.

Students as Writers

One of the facets of identity that students bring with them to my classroom is their identity as a writer. Writing is a complex activity that is connected to spoken language, lived experience, culture, and nearly every other part of my students being in the world. Because of this, the semester I spend with my students is only a small fragment of their life-long journey with writing, and my efforts to help them on that journey need to respect both the scope and the uniqueness of their writerly identities. In an effort to help my students in their long term growth as writers, I teach students strategies for learning how to write with new technologies in new environments so that they can assess new writing situations critically and effectively communicate in the varied contexts they will encounter throughout their careers outside the university. In my English 420 business writing class, students chose a technology commonly used in their field or future occupation and conducted empirical research with a professional to understand how the technology was used in context and to identify possible design flaws or issues with usability. The results of this research were then presented in a white paper which then became the seed for a subsequent project in which they proposed a new writing technology design. One student who wanted to become a financial planner studied the technologies one firm used to assemble and present client portfolios. For this student and others, a project like this gave them an opportunity to understand the writing challenges they will face and help them bridge the gap between our course and the work they will do outside the university. Approaching writing pedagogy this way focuses on students’ long term development as a writer and encourages them to see their writerly identity as integrated into their larger sense of self.

Transformations Through Technology

At the beginning of the semester, I often survey the students in my course, asking them what technologies they use to write. Overwhelmingly, my students write on phones and laptops and sometimes with a ballpoint pen. They feel comfortable with these devices and one of my key strategies as a teacher is to ask my students to step outside that comfort zone and engage with writing technologies that present them with new challenges. As mentioned in my cover letter, I asked my English 421 technical writing students to create a technical description poster using a letterpress. This challenging assignment required the ingenuity and efforts of the entire class with some students writing the descriptions and setting type, and other students planning and coordinating layout decisions, and other students designing and fabricating the plates used to print the visuals. We then juxtaposed this experience with an poster assignment in which the students were allowed to use InDesign or some other digital technology to create their own individual technical descriptions. Both of these technologies challenged my students to think about writing in new ways, specifically by asking them to make critical decisions about typography, layout, and design of visuals. The same teaching philosophy inspired a project in my Nuclear 480 class, in which my nuclear engineering students wrote and compiled a book on the basics of nuclear engineering for students investigating the major. Not only did these students learn about how to coordinate research topics and content across chapters, but they also had to learn how to use paragraph styles, page layout tools, and design standards in InDesign. This emphasis on transformations through technology pervades my teaching and will continue to be an integral part of my teaching in the future.