Teaching

The classroom I strive for is one focused on conversation—all of the available means of conversation. I seek to create a classroom that supports students accessing, creating, and engaging intellectually with texts, whether written or spoken, alphabetic or multimodal, traditional or digital. Given the continual emergence of new textual forms, it is my role as scholar and instructor to help students enter and participate in many conversations with the knowledge and tools they need to succeed now and in the future.

In my face-to-face and online classes, my assignments support my goal of helping students draw upon their existing knowledge to better understand the means of conversation, whether in writing, reading, speaking, or digital composing. Regardless of their starting points, all students can build upon their familiarity with composing. For instance, students concerned about composing Augmented Reality projects can draw upon outlining skills used in writing essays. Analyzing spoken interactions helps students prepare for creating their own podcasts. To help students address different levels of writing experience or anxiety, I lead my introductory college writing classes through collaboratively authoring an essay based on shared reading. This activity models invention, thesis development, multi-day writing processes, and peer review and reflection around which the class develops a shared language. In other classes, students research genres such as resumes, press releases, and research interviews, and media such as podcasts, videos, and blogs, and then together build wiki sites to house samples of the kinds of texts they will be composing. Then we collaboratively develop rubrics for evaluating work. Students thus learn to identify successful and less successful entries into conversation.

Helping my students enter contemporary conversation means using multiple tools and multiple media. In my speaking intensive courses, students create podcasts using primary and secondary research presenting how professionals communicate. These podcasts become assigned listening homework, providing students with an audience beyond the instructor. This assignment emphasizes students as valuable classroom knowledge creators as they interview experts—from ESPN commentators to scientists, business professionals, and non-U.S. citizens—resulting in a breadth of voices across disciplines and life experiences, inside and outside the university.

When teaching audio, video, or visual production, I support students' entry into conversation by helping them obtain knowledge of and access to technology. In online courses, I require students to try different online tools, all free, for the invention process: freewriting, mapping, visual arrangement, ambient noise, and more. Having taught at universities with diverse student bodies and high populations of first-generation college students, I am committed to supporting student access to digital resources.

As a whole, my pedagogy aligns with my research interests in multimodality and literacy across a variety of contexts, specifically to help students converse using multiple modes and multiple media in multiple contexts. I strive to ensure my pedagogy reflects new research and engages new technological expectations of my students' skills as they build rhetorical agency for their academic work and move into a future with continually evolving demands on their literacy skills.