Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Student engagement is my central concern as a teacher, and to this end I foster a participatory, collaborative learning environment that alternates and remixes learning activities each class period. In the first-year writing course, I regularly include small-group activities, in class freewriting prompts, discussions based on the assigned reading, and multimedia examples to facilitate these discussions. I advocate the use of technology as both a teaching tool and a mode of composition, but only when technology will help me achieve my goal of student engagement and, in association, actual learning in class and beyond.

I implied that there is a difference between using technology as a teaching tool and a mode of composition. As a teaching tool, I use technology to facilitate the learning process. For example, I use the university course management system to record grades online. Students can access their grades at any time and keep track of their progress, giving them a sense of independence and the ability to double-check my calculations and totals. Also, in most class meetings, I use a laptop and projector to add a visual component to the lesson, whether I show a small color-coded excerpt of a student text for discussion, a video of a politician’s rhetoric in a speech, or a magazine advertisement demonstrating rhetorical fallacies. When I use technology as a mode of composition, however, the stakes are higher.

Digital technology has provided new platforms, new genres, and new audiences for writers. In following, these new technologies are changing how young people write. Kathleen Blake Yancey, Gunther Kress, Anne Wysocki, and other composition scholars have argued convincingly that students should be taught modes of composition beyond the academic essay. These new modes of composition do not deploy technology as mere teaching tools or passive sites of learning, but rather as the experiential learning itself. Students learn the technology as they draft their compositions, and this entwined process provides an opportunity to discuss how writing is mediated by the materiality of a text and the tools used to create it. Within the limits of the standardized first-year writing course, which I have taught for the past few years, I have had success with Twitter and WordPress blogs. With more freedom, I would like the opportunity to teach a web-based collaborative writing assignment, a multimodal Sophie Book, a remix video students would post on YouTube or Vimeo, or an audio essay created with Audacity software.

I do not view technology as a tool for replicating traditional academic writing in digital spaces. Technology is changing writing, and I want to be there to help with this change. Today’s students are more networked than ever before, although they do not always have the awareness to be critical and cautious users of technology. Part of my teaching mission is to heighten students’ awareness of the effects of information technologies on their lives. I integrate blogs and online social networks in my classes to expose students to various public audiences and simultaneously enhance teacher-to-student contact. If I can encourage my students to think carefully and critically about their relationship with the technologies they use to communicate and create identities, then I believe new media can foster a learning community of critics, teachers, and student writers in my class and across the country.

To achieve success in such a networked, collaborative classroom, students must be clear on expectations so that they know how much liberty they have with a given assignment. Additionally, collaboration amongst students depends on a positive group dynamic; it is essential that I be sensitive to diverse student populations and insist on such sensitivity in class discussions and peer-to-peer interactions. Finally, I must allow time in and out of class to help students who do not have as much computer literacy or access to technology as one would hope. I must ensure that issues of accessibility do not impede a student from doing well on a writing assignment with a tech requirement.