As an instructor of first-year writing, I focus on traditional essay composition and digital humanities in order to lead students toward a rich understanding of the various rhetorical situations in academic and professional contexts. My courses provide students practical opportunities to develop abilities in written, oral, and electronic modes of communication. In first-year composition, for example, my curriculum balances utilitarian assignments, such as report and technical writing, with critical-creative assignments, such as game design and archives-based DH projects. In tandem with process-driven learning methods, the critical value of my teaching philosophy is “creativity through constraint,” which affords students an artistic agency when undertaking humanities projects with specific multimodal parameters.
Developed from my own undergraduate and postdoctoral experiences in higher education, my teaching style follows a STEM-centered approach to humanities, considering the distinctive features of language that interface psychological and material structures. By breaking down conceptual structures through linguistic analysis, my classes work to understand texts as entities of data, flexible as both quantitative and qualitative data. This methodological binary helps by offering different lenses through which texts can be seen through critical, interdisciplinary connections. Synthesizing the methodologies of the sciences with humanities in a multimodal composition course creates new developments in the grammars we use to explain the challenging concepts incumbent on contemporary human experience. For example, using concordance software to analyze a text offers many students a fresh way of looking at information. By designing writing curriculum through multimodality, I emphasize how the rhetorical canon offers a critical model for the exploratory “sandboxes” of digital mediums. Process-driven assignments address the challenges of structural form and content creation by taking students through the necessary steps to produce argumentative writing. This scaffolded approach implements traditional methods in digital practices, and students arrange, invent, and deliver new narratives from an empowered voice of critical inquiry.
From intellectual beginnings into interpretive investigations and through the stages of drafting and revising, the design of my courses emphasizes both the individual and collaborative processes of writing. By leading courses through phases of content discussion, essay drafts, and revision, I create inclusive classroom spaces that foster practical measures to address challenging rhetorical concepts, through a collaboratively developed vocabulary. Developing a shared language allows students a greater engagement with their colleagues, through rhetorical and interpretive perspectives. Similarly, given a learner-centered teaching philosophy, shared systems of language offer communal language as a “meta-grammar” for the course, providing the keywords for reflection on goal-based learning.
To continue along those lines of social engagement, my pedagogical approach to diversity is to utilize the classroom space to create conversations of inclusivity. My philosophy is that a liberal arts university provides a unique space to foster cross cultural conversations, essential to humanistic study, and a real opportunity to create the locus of positive social change. The classroom, for example, is an excellent environment in which to explore the mixture of perspective, voice and identity, and empirical, social thought. In my teaching, I engage with a diverse population of students, from traditional students in my university-level literature courses as well as non-traditional students in the community college classes I lead. In both of these teaching environments, I work with a wide range of students and find that a learner-centered approach is most appropriate as it focuses on the holistic qualities of the individual student and what the student needs to be successful. For example, in my community college classes which serve a large minority population, I adapt my teaching to the abilities of the students, where oftentimes disabilities, literacy and comprehension are tremendous challenges to learning. My goal in these educational situations is to create environments that nurture and can reliably respond to the needs of the student. Specifically, by tailoring my language to promote inclusivity — by simplifying, condensing or expanding, providing everyday examples, and also using neutral vocabulary – I work to create spaces of non-isolating communication that can harbor complex discourses.
Every student deserves attention during their educational experience, and I see it as my job to be their advocate, to be aware of their individual strengths, interests, and needs. I intend for my students to consider me as an intellectual ally and a fair assessor of their abilities. My overall goal is to teach and learn with my students in order to help facilitate successful academic, personal, and professional outcomes.
