Teaching Philosophy
I design my courses with three aims in mind: (1) to affirm students’ lived experiences and expertise; (2) to facilitate their development as rhetors composing within a variety of modes and technologies; and (3) to build opportunities for students to transfer their rhetorical knowledge to the work they do in their own disciplines and communities. To access my teaching philosophy statement, click here.
This version of technical and professional communication will emphasize instruction in user experience (UX) writing. Bringing together theories of user-centered design and methodologies of inclusive design, students will design digital writing portfolios that feature their own implementation of UX methods to drive their content design. Students will compose UX writing using industry tools to ideate, design, prototype, test, revise, and edit their UX writing across different platforms for end users.
DIGITAL MEDIA STORYTELLING
This course surveys current trends in dynamic digital storytelling through the exploration of image, text, and design. Students will consider narrative conventions in digital new media production, including how stories are crafted and produced for various new media genres. Students will identify best practices for the implementation of a digital storytelling projects through their engagement in-class discussion, studio production workshops, and the use of varied digital new media-driven tools and publishing platforms.
This course surveys rhetorical histories and theories to understand how the self and the digital realms become interconnected. Students will seek out a variety of digital platforms to study how shared behaviors, technologies, values, spaces, and knowledge-making practices enable publics to emerge and transform across digital spaces. Since digital platforms are never simply neutral or a-rhetorical spaces, these digital publics afford insight into the ways issues of gender, race, ethnicity, dis/ability, and class show up in interesting and powerful ways.
This course equips students to become skilled technical communicators in the professional workplace. Students learn genre conventions to compose and design professional written and digital “texts” in the form of reports, memos, portfolios, proposals, and reflections. Additionally, students will be introduced to various technological tools to compose and design technical documents for diverse audiences and rhetorical purposes.
This course surveys theories of rhetoric to make sense of the ways symbolic expression is put to work to mobilize change. Students will engage in questions of ethics, responsibility, agency, and advocacy by examining evolving social justice movements that continue into the present. How might everyday citizens step into the role of advocates for social change? Finding an answer to this question invites reflection on the ways social justice movements of the past continue to hold meaning for the present.
This introductory writing course teaches all stages of the writing process to help students develop critical thinking and information literacy skills to communicate effectively in academic contexts. Assignments are designed to cultivate students’ abilities to evaluate, analyze and critically assess how diverse texts (written, visual, and performative rhetorics) remain responsive to larger rhetorical situations.
The course focuses on the genre of travel and adventure nonfiction literature and travel writing as a professional genre. We will learn about Japanese language, culture, and history through Japanese authors writing about their experiences and how visitors to Japan create compelling narratives about their experiences. This class will ask you to compose in multiple modes and media as you reflect on your experiences this summer.
While continuing to stress the importance of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills emphasized in first year writing, as well as the importance of using writing as a recursive process involving invention, drafting, collaboration, revision, rereading, and editing to clearly and effectively communicate ideas for specific purposes, occasions, and audiences, this course focuses on teaching students research skills that allow them to effectively incorporate outside sources in their writing and to compose in a variety of genres for specific contexts.
This course moves beyond the day-to-day specifics of the first year writing syllabus in order to prepare instructors for creating and directing their own composition courses in the future. The aim is to introduce instructors to a variety of pedagogical practices and concepts through assigned readings, discussions, and guest speaker panels assessing issues of pedagogy and course design.
