Teaching
What am I doing now? I just finished teaching an online section of English 331 - Communication for Engineering & Technology, offered through the Professional Writing Program (Department of English, NCSU). This is a technical writing/professional communication course for students in engineering disciplines and computer science. I'll teach this course again in the Summer I 2012 term. In Summer II 2012, I'll be teaching STS 214 - Introduction to Science & Technology Studies for the Science, Technology, & Society program (Department of Interdisciplinary Studies).
Teacher Training
My teacher training began at the University of Waterloo in a graduate course titled Writing Theory and Pedagogy with Catherine F. Schryer. Since then, I have completed another theory-based course in instruction, Technologies and Pedagogies in the Communication Arts, with Susan Miller-Cochran at NCSU.
Complementary to my theory-based coursework, I have completed the Certificate of Accomplishment in Teaching (CoAT) program, offered through the NCSU Graduate School. You may find a full list of workshops I attended for CoAT on my professional development page and a letter of confirmation and recommendation for CoAT here (PDF). In addition to CoAT, I completed the Inquiry Guided TA Training (IGTT) Program, through the Professional Writing Program.
Continuing my training in the Fall 2013 term, I will begin the Preparing the Professoriate program through the NCSU Graduate School. My application was selected for this program, proving me with a teaching fellowship. The program includes participation in seminars, observations, teaching an upper-divison course, and close mentorship by a faculty member with a distinguished history of teaching. My mentor for the program will be NCSU Professor of English Ann M. Penrose.
Please find my statement of teaching, or teaching philosophy, below. You will find an experimental "techno-teaching philosophy" below the traditional two page summary. This experimental philosophy aims to emphaise how I include technologies, and theories of technology, in my classroom (both physical and online).
Teaching Philosophy: Instruction in Rhetoric and Writing
Participation in a community of practice is profitably elucidated by Kenneth Burke's "unending conversation" metaphor. In The Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke asks his readers to imagine arriving late to a parlor. Immediately the reader must recognize that the ongoing conversations are also preceding conversations. Like Laurence Sterne's befuddled Tristram Shandy, the misapprehension of discourse as discernible, discrete, and linear is disrupted. "You listen for a while," Burke continues, and once his reader has caught the thrust of the argument, they may join the conversation. On the periphery the newly found member of the conversation slowly wades in, timid at first, but eventually masters the vocabulary, common knowledge, and the decorum of the conversational space. Best of its kind or not, "the discussion is interminable" and "[t]he hour grows late, you must depart." Burke's reader then departs the conversation.
An unending conversation metaphor and the subsequent description of the process of joining a conversation has fundamentally shaped my approach to teaching. First, my pedagogical approach accounts for the novice, the reader on the periphery, struggling to join the conversation. Second, the act of joining the conversation is what allows the reader--my students--to meaningfully advance themselves into their disciplinary discussions. Accordingly, I design learning artifacts for my students by recalling a position from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics, wherein he writes that "For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing them" (II.1103a33). That is to say, to ensure a productive learning experience I design my learning artifacts with the belief that students must be provided with a space to be rhetorical, to practice persuading and arguing.
Encouraging students to be rhetorical means having students construct persuasive arguments. Forming such arguments in multiple contexts, both orally and textually, shapes student learning at a fundamental level, allowing them to translate skills learned in the classroom to their respective disciplinary understandings and work. That is, they are asked to begin the process of joining a disciplinary conversation. For example, the basic rhetorical principle of "knowing one's audience" is a lesson that powerfully alters student's production of texts, such as cover letters and résumés. Being rhetorical allows a student to move beyond a superficial mimicry of other's texts or arguments and learn to invent their own.
Being rhetorical includes an ability to be adaptive to situations as well as audiences. In the classroom, I believe that both the instructor and student must be at once reflective and receptive to achieve this end. Being a reflective instructor is a well-accepted pedagogical approach to instruction in the writing classroom. However, increasingly rapid change in genre conventions and technologies that mediate our communication require that, as instructors, we also become increasingly receptive. Genre studies has informed my understanding of the necessity to be receptive of genre and technology (medium) changes to and in modes of communication. Practically, I employ my understanding of medium and genre changes by engaging in both academia and industry to inform, and keep relevant, my classroom content, instruction, and evaluation. My efforts to remain current are acknowledged by students as a valuable qualification; for example, an engineering student commented in an evaluation that I know "a lot about effective writing and also about engineering/computer science - and that is what kind of teacher we need."
Providing students with concrete examples of discipline-related documentation and writing coupled with formulaic thinking (e.g., specific models of argumentation or genre moves) are some of the strategies I have employed to translate my knowledge to the classroom. For example, if my students need to learn how to write instructions, then I will provide them with example and discuss how those examples seem to make their moves. This method opens up a space for formative evaluation. Once my students have completed a draft of their work based on our analysis of an artifact, I like to pair students to have them test each other's documentation. For example, with the instruction document assignment I will have students test each other's draft (i.e., do the instructions, if followed, achieve the desired results?). This kind of activity further allows for navigation through Bloom's taxonomy, moving from basic knowledge-based information about technical writing practices to application and analysis to later evaluation.
Another way to think about my approach is to recall a term from rhetorical antiquity, imitatio. Imitatio, imitation, should be taken not as "copying," but a familiarization of genre precepts through (re)use of genre exemplars. The nuances of the genre conventions, situated in disciplinary spaces, are allowed to emerge from the argumentative structures employed. For example, one of my term assignments is the composition of a feature specification for a technical writing course. A feature specification, in this rhetorically-informed pedagogy, is not only a practical addition to a student's portfolio; instead, the feature specification becomes a tool by which a student is enable to enact a genre after some deliberation about its function, audience, style, and arrangement. This enactment of a genre allows a student to actively engage the nuances and peculiarities of the genre in the disciplinary framework of software development. Further, it allows students to develop technical, research, and writing skills through the creation of their specification.
A rhetorically-informed curriculum recalls the contradictory proposition that we first learn before we can do, but must learn by doing. Writing classrooms, then, become a space where students learn by writing, reviewing, and sharing experience with particular kinds of texts or documents. My goals for learning outcomes are, then, to provide science and engineering students with skills to continue to improve the clarity of their arguments and thereby the clarity of their writing. For English or Communications majors, my goal is to provide an explication of theory in and through practice while integrating increasingly ubiquitous digital technologies into their disciplinary understanding.
Techno-Teaching Philosophy
Now please take a moment to explore my techno-teaching philosophy, which provides a different perspective on the above text. A techno-teaching philosophy has helped me think through the instructional and pedagogical decisions that I make in the classroom and I hope that it provides you with a better sense of my approach to teaching and learning.
I am a Ph.D. student in the Communication, Rhetoric, & Digital Media (CRDM) program at North Carolina State University. My research interests are in the areas of rhetoric, genre, rhetoric of science, and technical communication.
