Teaching Philosophy

It’s the power of writing that most intrigues me as a rhetoric and professional communication teacher—particularly how one text can change so radically as it circulates among professional, public and popular contexts—and I want my students to become likewise interested. It’s fascinating to watch as they observe how a topic important to their lives is represented by an expert, Tom Brokaw or Britney Spears. During my students’ observations, I challenge them to understand writing not only as a rhetorical act, but as an ethical act as well.

What follows are the specifics of my pedagogical approach to writing as rhetorical and ethical, and how it has informed my understanding of the privileges and responsibilities of the communication scholar-teacher.

Most of my students enter my class thinking that "good" writing is a text free of mechanical errors; they also equate "rhetoric" with frippery and spin-doctoring. The result is a student writer who is new to the idea of writing as rhetorical, an act involving audience, purpose, and context (in fact, I refer to audience-purpose-context so often that my students eventually chant the words along with me!)

Rhetorical awareness is a major focus of my curricula; students are asked to submit rhetorical analyses with their written work. Seeing the act of writing as rhetorical—whether or not the document’s purpose is explicitly argumentative—can be a difficult task for them at first. Early in the semester I am told that my assignments are difficult because students can't figure out "what [I] want." Inevitably, though, they learn to recognize the difference between the auto-pilot mode they assume when writing in the classroom for the teacher alone, and the bigger challenge of rhetorically analyzing their documents for a variety of audiences and purposes throughout the academy and beyond.

For instance, in the writing classes linked to Iowa State University's Learning Community Initiative, I used issues of community sustainability to help my students see writing as rhetorical. In the Agriculture Biosystems Engineering (ABE) learning community, we discussed how the programs of study linked to ABE, although very similar, each constituted a distinct academic community and, beyond ISU, a professional community, complete with its preferred genres and writing conventions. An "organizational description" assignment, for example, asked students to critique the organizational culture of a prospective employer, write a resume for that audience, then demonstrate the resume’s rhetorical effectiveness in a memo to me. This assignment enabled the students to recognize the mutually sustaining relationship between their community’s tacit value system and the writing conventions privileged by that community.

Also because my students initially do not see writing as a rhetorical act, they believe that a text is neutral, rather than an act that impacts and shapes the world (see Gunner [2006] for more on this phenomenon). My curricula therefore ask students to recognize the complexities of writing as a political behavior, i.e., that the writing decisions they make are a tacit promotion and omission of certain values. Approaching writing in this manner gives my students a sense of agency because they must determine if they want to promote these values through their writing.

I’ve discovered that one of the most effective strategies in demonstrating writing as an ethical act is to assign so-called "real world" work, requiring students to assume a role in a community they otherwise might not experience. The authenticity of their experiences teaches my students to attach genuine weight to their writing decisions—especially since most of our "real world" clients sustain their existence via written solicitations.

The clients who work with my students are usually non-profit organizations, an executive decision I allowed myself as a teacher. The majority of my students have had little or no volunteer experience, and many have told me that they enjoyed being a part of a non-profit community. Students learn to care about the future of their client’s mission and to see their writing assignments as contributing to that goal. In the past, some of the projects have included grant application letters on behalf of a no-kill animal sanctuary (Southern Animal Rescue Association), a local domestic abuse shelter, and Habitat for Humanity, a Web site for an artist who conducts public workshops (Mudworks), and a publicly distributed brochure for a welfare-to-work program (Beyond Welfare.)

The Beyond Welfare project proved especially interesting for my students to experience and for me to witness. First, my students wrote a proposal report to me, forecasting the project they planned to construct for their client; because the proposal included a "Need for Project" section, the students had to philosophically justify why they believed not only in the project but the client’s mission as a non-profit. For several of my more politically conservative students, working for an organization that assisted welfare recipients was personally challenging. By meeting with their client and interacting with Beyond Welfare’s program participants, though, all of my students eventually found a niche where their beliefs fit with the BW community’s. My conservative students, for example, decided that they should support a private welfare-to-work program as a preferred alternative to a government-operated program.

By constructing professional documents for a client and a cause they believe in, students have the autonomy they desire and the responsibility they need. They realize that writing does have an impact, and they enjoy working for a "real" person who exists outside their immediate personal and disciplinary communities.

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I am a teacher because the profession allows me to engage with students, to recognize their issues, and most importantly, to make relevant a course curriculum that can help people in their academic and professional lives. In its own way, an oft-written comment on my class evaluations, "I didn’t think writing was important until I took this class," is the best compliment I can get.

Bibliography

Gunner, J. (2006). The boxing effect (an anti-essay). In P. Sullivan & H. Tinberg (Eds.), What is “college-level” writing? (pp. 110-120). Urbana, IL: NCTE.