Teaching Statement
I teach with the goal of helping my students interpret language and the contexts of its use, both in and out of school. In my classes, students compose research papers, newspaper articles, visual arguments, web pages, and other genres, all with attention to the situatedness of argumentative claims. As I design and implement both traditional assignments and those less frequently taught in composition, my students gain a deeper perception of argument that makes them better able to cope with and respond to the mass of information they encounter daily.
Helping students reinterpret the information that surrounds them gives my class meaning within and beyond college writing. Many students accept their cultural contexts uncritically, as merely “how things are.” By encouraging students to see that culture is rhetorical (that is, it continually persuades them to approach the world in certain ways), I help them develop critical literacy practices with which they can critique dominant discourses. For example, each semester I assign Amy Tan’s essay “Mother Tongue,” which focuses on Tan’s mixed relationship with “standard” English. Class discussion about this essay interrogates the concept of “standard” English, asking why particular ways of using language are set up as standard as well as who benefits from this standardization. Students often refer back to this discussion, claiming that it helped them understand that the emphasis schools tend to place on “standard” English is not value-neutral. To borrow from Paulo Freire, literacy is reading both the word and the world—the two are linked in my teaching.
Another of the ways in which I link the word and the world in the classroom is by integrating technology. I prioritize such integration for three main reasons: to value the literacy practices that students bring to the classroom, to teach students multimedia argument, and to encourage students to develop a critical awareness of their increasingly technologized experiences. My visual argument assignment is one example of a composition that touches on all of these goals. Through the process of creating a visual claim, students work through various technologies including visual Internet searches, image manipulation programs, and presentation software. As students create arguments in a visual context, I encourage them to realize that media do not neutrally communicate information but rather integrally shape the claims they transmit. Such awareness of the rhetorical importance of media is essential for students in a world where writing and the writing process are increasingly mediated by technologies.
My class is heavy on discussion and light on lecture because I present writing as a process, not an end goal to which I alone have access. For the same reason, I design assignments that specifically encourage students to reflect on their writing processes and experiences of writing. Assembling these narratives throughout the semester makes visible, to myself and to students, the strengths and weaknesses in each student’s writing process. This attention to process also helps students overcome the anxiety many of them feel about writing. Viewed this way, writing becomes a series of choices that can be dealt with individually, helping the students who are most intimidated by writing to gain the confidence they need to significantly improve and helping students who are already talented writers to find areas for development.
Ultimately, I teach because I value students. I hope that by encouraging and modeling critical literacy, I will prompt students to be both better learners and more engaged with the world around them.