teaching philosophy

I love finding ways to activate and sustain creative vision and rhetorical efficacy. Toward that end, curating classroom ambiance plays a vital role, and the act of shaping compositional spaces ideally values the guiding impulse of play. Composing with various forms of media and guided by rhetorical sensitivity, we work together to illuminate the promises and possibilities of effective rhetorics. I have seen that students are more able to relax, think, act, and perform effectively when they are honestly invited to play. This notion of honesty hopes to play out beginning on Day One of class, when I tell my students, “You already know everything I’m going to teach you about rhetoric.” While some students raise a brow, perhaps trying to recall a definition of “rhetoric,” it’s the “you already know” part that seems to deflate measurable units of tension from the room. I say, “We’re just gonna reanimate what you already know — amp up your shapeshifting skills.” Some students respond to the hint of game rhetoric in my invitation, and we talk about scenes of everyday life, scenes that reveal that we have spent our lives learning how to make great rhetorical choices. From what we choose to wear for the day or occasion, to when it may be wise to not hit “send,” to personal matters like tearing a page from a private journal because we’ve decided to attempt to reject a certain version of ourselves. These scenes from our routine lives contribute to our primary frame of reference, as the notion of “real people in real lives” guides us throughout the class. 

Our play advances through improvisational invention. We write, read, watch (YouTube Fridays!), listen (Talking Heads audio accompanies many writing sessions), draw, take photos and video, remix, revise, critique, and generally endeavor to make clever arrangements, ultimately, rhetorical artifacts that matter. In our workshops, we use a variety of analog and digital tools toward the production of our rhetorical artifacts, be they essays, multimodal compositions, or other types of strategic attempt and performance. The student writing I promote often takes traditional print form, and we certainly learn to write according to genre conventions, including many of those that persist in print-based academic writing. However, the student writing that emerges from our classroom exchanges may also be found radiating beyond the conventional contours of academic writing, which has itself shifted in response to cinematic, digital, and visual turns. 

From within these improvisational spaces of possibility, we find motivation and method. Student communication strengths and needs become clear through our workshop-intensive classes. Using detailed assignment prompts, theoretical frames in the form of published texts, webtexts, images, videos, and other essayistic forms, we begin to compose. We are guided by successful samples from former students (who have granted permission, often quite proud to have been asked). I attempt to create conditions sufficient for clearing space — space to try, to make, to reanimate our being together as writers, composers, makers, and beings. 

on diversity & inclusivity

I began my Teaching Assistantship and graduate studies both aware of my privilege as a white, middle-class, cis-gendered woman and sensitive to age differences and gender dynamics that called for vigilance and rhetorical care in my everyday interactions with students and peers. Early on, I was driven to inclusive pedagogies. As they were for many of us, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, and Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed became the voices of reason and hope. In the midst of emergent conversations on class, feminism, gender, misogyny, race, sexual identity, sexual orientation, and transphobia — all of which shaped complex literacy debates — I was determined to be my best for all of my students, and this meant problematizing teacherly authority, reading and theorizing decolonial praxis, and embracing active, student-centered, pedagogies.

My early efforts at inclusive literacy work was guided by student voices. Early on, I realized that when I assigned personal writing, our classes often seemed to open up and become more lively spaces of potential for anti-misogynist and anti-racist conversations and emergent inclusive dispositions. Driven by the impactful nature of the writing we shared and student comments that routinely claimed to find personal writing empowering, I wrote my Master’s Thesis on the illuminating, personal, "liberatory," and social roles of personal writing. At the same time, my dreamy sentiments were echoed in the scholarship of my field. Of note, Victor Villanueva’s Bootstraps was, at the time, beloved and prized among those of us devoted to inclusive literacy work. Villanueva enhanced our sense of possibility regarding effective pedagogies that could support our students by enhancing their rhetorical knowledge and skill sufficiently so that they might advance within their own particular dreams. Helping students achieve their individual goals is rewarding work, but it seems likely to find more productive energies when situated in programs that do more than simply encourage elemental literacy skills. We must additionally work to foster a culture of inclusivity in writing pedagogy and programs that support writing-intensive activities.

In 2021, we have much more content to guide us in evolving our best teaching and learning practices, particularly due to the power and reach of the #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements. So culturally resonant is a decolonial turn in pedagogy that we are openly exploring white supremacy as a frame for thinking the problems and potentials of various structures for teaching and learning. Notably, in the 2019 CCCC Chair's Address, Asoa Inoue's landmark talk invited us to wonder, "How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?". Inoue insists that "The key to fighting White language supremacy is in changing the structures, cutting the steel bars, altering the ecology, in which our biases function in our classrooms and communities," and his assertions resonate powerfully with students, teachers and literacy workers. In today's anti-racist and decolonial classroom spaces, we strive to center students and student agency in active, collaborative practices that shape our work and world together with a desire to diminish suffering and enhance love, listening, and understanding.

In our strong, shared desires to decenter teacherly authority while engaging practices that support emergent rhetorical efficacy, we must learn to appreciate small and large steps. For example, one small (but large) step came, for me, when I began sitting through class discussions and reading student writing without a pen in hand 100% of the time. This practice invites me to read first for meaning rather than correctness or Standard Written English, exclusively. I also trained myself to became familiar with cultural customs, such as relative “shyness,” selective silences, and other postures and gestures that might indicate lack of engagement but were more likely examples of different customs, possibly a form of inherited embodied submissiveness students had experienced in conventionally top-down teaching and learning scenarios. I found joy in the process of finding new ways to teach by appreciating differences rather than teaching to a conformity that might diminish creativity and confidence.

A willingness to move beyond the familiar is vital to any success. In my first tenure track job, as a Writing Program Administrator in Utah, I discovered a need for intense rhetorical listening as I was challenged to teach rhetorically-informed, logic-based writing practices to many of my students of faith (who lived in a faith tradition with which I was unfamiliar). In an effort to best address their needs, I began to theorize how faith shapes classroom performances and student experiences of institutional learning, and writing. In conversations with peers, I found like-minded colleagues, and, over a period of a few years, we had developed what became Negotiating Religious Faith in the Composition Classroom (Heinemann, 2005), a co-edited a collection of essays addressing the roles of faith in writing instruction. I continue to learn about these and other dispositions that shape the potential of writing classrooms. Aware of diverse ways of being that make up any teaching and learning scenario, I strive to bring an informed, improvisational spirit to all of my work.

Advancing a community oriented writing pedagogy, I learned that I need to do more than value and hope for all of my students. Though it's powerful, I learned that it’s not enough to make us feel good about ourselves and our literacies as individuals. I learned that we need to cultivate community conditions sufficient to help each of us radiate that we're all capable rhetors, able to discover where and how we need to situate and revise our skills to succeed in different kinds of literacy scenes. These community conditions must include:

1.) Accessible classrooms.

2.) Options for learning that are attentive to cultural differences, and diverse learning styles.

3.) Attentiveness to food, mental health, wellness, and housing insecurity, and

4.) A shared devotion to the community space and its dynamic, carefully curated ambiance.

As a teacher, as a leader, it is my responsibility to seek all options for creating safe, comfortable, vibrant spaces for effective teaching and learning. Working in collaboration with campus groups and individuals trained and prepared to assist with accessibility, diversity, and inclusivity, a campus Writing Program becomes a powerful space for radiating our highest shared ideals and hopes for the roles we play in students' education and preparation for participation in academic, civic, personal, professional, and community life.

Our vital scenes of literacy impact students powerfully. Literacy is a valuable tool in addressing needs and desires. Literacy creates opportunities to strive beyond despair, into struggle and collaboration, and toward success. I've experienced versions of this renewal cycle. For, despite my privilege, I know how to fail. In fact, I flunked out of college on my first attempt. I had been radically underprepared for college when I began studying in the early eighties. I studied punk rock, performed in several bands, rarely went to class, and was eventually placed on “permanent suspension.” Later in life, I had to learn how to learn, how to rejoin a community, and how to motivate myself to advance absent the kinds of routine, baseline skills many of my peers obviously possessed. Remembering these deeply felt deficiencies, I find room to identify with students who struggle on the basis of their particular skill levels and needs. I can’t claim to identify fully with students in the particulars of their various struggles, but experience shows that collaborative community literacy work provides impetus for productive change.

Finally, I return to my early mentors. My desire for student success is deeply indebted to Mike Rose’s (1989) Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements ofAmerica’s Underprepared. Rose’s stories activated a desire, and I began to wonder if I might do the kinds of good work he had done, creating inviting workspaces for emerging writers. I responded positively and soon became fairly enchanted. My enchantment derives in no small part from my failures. My non-traditional path nurtured my capacity to withstand ambiguity, conflict, challenges, and obstacles in ways that serve my writing and the writing practices I teach. My affinity for disorientation and improvisational “yes-anding” as states of being most conducive to teaching and learning helps me prepare each day for the work ahead (in classrooms, with faculty, in my scholarship, and beyond).

As a teacher and a leader, I work from within improvisational spaces of possibility, where we may all find motivation and method that moves critical habits of mind, practice, and being. Student writing and communication strengths and needs become clear through programs offering workshop-intensive, process-oriented compositional activities. Aided by networks of support (classes, clubs, diversity workers, instructors, peers, writing centers, learning resource centers), students ideally find that they may work with and through their differences toward the clarity-shaping reception and production of effective texts and confident rhetorical performances.

Works Cited

Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury, 1973.

hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.

Villanueva, Jr., Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. NCTE, 1993.