​My teaching philosophy is based on my belief in rhetoric:

its complexity, its power, and its usefulness.



The Basics

When I teach composition, I equip students with foundational rhetorical principles:

​
​     the rhetorical situation, ​

     considerations of audience and purpose, ​

     available means of identification and persuasion, etc.

​

These principles become student writers’ problem-solving tools and provide a scaffold for exploring delivery, a concept that I believe fosters critical competencies for twenty-first century writers.





 

Writing as Problem Solving 

I hold that every communication situation can be best understood as a rhetorical problem. By taking a rhetorical approach to the teaching of writing, I enable students to embrace fundamental rhetorical principles as heuristics that they can turn to—and return to—no matter the writing exigence.

 

​

One of my pedagogical objectives, then, involves modeling the use of rhetorical principles as heuristics for solving writing “problems.” To this end, I frame students’ initial thoughts about a new writing project as a problem statement. Soon thereafter, I expect students to do this framing on their own, asking them to write problem statements to share with their peers.

 

​

Problem statements in my first-year writing classes often involve questions of audience, as students grapple with exigencies other than writing for teacher-as-audience. In technical writing courses, I encourage students to formulate problem statements that implicate more advanced considerations such as user needs, safety, accessibility, professional conventions, and limited resources for production. By sharing these problem statements, students can leverage peers’ collective experiences and ideas in order to strategize about the most fitting response to a rhetorical problem. Framing writing opportunities as solutions to rhetorical problems positions students to capitalize on what they might otherwise view as writing constraints, challenges such as writers’ language diversity, cultural orientations, writing anxiety, unfamiliarity with genre conventions, etc.

​



​Delivery and Multimodal Writing

I am also committed to heightening students’ understanding of the rhetorical canon of delivery, a valuable theoretical concept for contemporary writers. I encourage students to explore three elements of delivery:

​

     (1) the materiality of writing (e.g., composition that appears on paper or screens, words that are spoken),

     (2) multimodal design (e.g., the mixing of verbal, visual, animated, and aural composition), and

     (3) registers of delivery in specific contexts (e.g., the use of plain/middle/high style in relation to a composer’s discourse

      communities, disciplinary/genre conventions, and modes of production).

​

To help students work with the concept of delivery, I create assignments that encourage them to experiment with multimodal writing. For example, in an introductory technical writing course, attention to delivery encourages students to consider their e-portfolio design and content from the standpoint of specific users they identify. Resulting e-portfolios vary widely in terms of layout, navigation, and word-to-text ratio. In my first-year writing sections, I ask students to convert a researched, academic essay they have written for our course into a public document such as a poster, brochure, op/ed article, or public service announcement with accompanying tweets or Facebook posts. This assignment is often challenging to students who must revisit their essay with new eyes, strategizing about what type of (re)composition and (re)design will encourage interest and circulation among a new intended audience.



​

What Does This Philosophy Look Like in the Classroom?

To supplement students’ experimentation, I try to develop their critical awareness of the complexity of composing in the twenty-first century. Students might read Molly Bang’s description of how pictures work or grapple with what it means to write for the ear by analyzing an episode of the radio program This American Life. Alternately, we might discuss issues of usability when viewing the Department of Defense’s digital job-search guide for military spouses or explore the ethics of informational density by analyzing an infographic circulating online. In each of these situations, students practice “slow analysis,” studying a text in detail, in context, and with rhetorical principles in mind. With slow analysis, students observe qualities of textual composition that are normally invisible or taken-for-granted, observations that can then inform their own composition. By heightening students’ critical awareness and rhetorical adaptability, I aim to prepare them to intervene effectively into any number of public, institutional, professional, and disciplinary conversations.