Of all the aspects of teaching in higher education, I have always been most interested in teaching. I felt called to teach writing when I first began exploring the idea to attend graduate school in English. The idea of studying rhetoric and composition, being able to look at ways everyday writing is persuasive, and teaching students all sorts of writing forms, was so appealing. It feels good to light a similar fire in my students; last academic year I know I was able to make a positive impact on some students. I had a student who changed his major to English Education after having an epiphany about wanting to teach writing, not science! This year he worked at the campus Writers Workshop at my recommendation.
Looking at my more recent evaluation of my teaching by my students, it did not surprise me that my Technical Writing students tended to give me higher ratings. Teaching workplace-related writing and multimedia writing courses gives me a great deal of satisfaction. These are the sorts of compositions are students are often the most interested in – students typically talk about wanting “real world experience” (though when they do I remind them that the university is a part of the “real world”), and they tend to be floored when I point out that TikTok posts are a form of writing. I like that combination of providing the sort of instruction they readily perceive as useful, and surprising them that they are likely already successful persuasive communicators. The fact is, as I write in my teaching philosophy statement, many students are reluctant writers, and I want to help them overcome this reluctance.
What has worked well in my teaching practice is a willingness to try new things. For example, this past academic year I experimented with using Kahoot interactive quizzes in classes as an engaging way to review material. It was well received by students in Technical Writing and First-Year Composition courses, so I will continue to use Kahoot; this semester I get to learn how to run Kahoot quizzes for online courses. Being understanding of my students’ busy, complicated lives and exercising a reasonable amount of flexibility has also worked well. This semester I am retaining my two-day grace period with most due dates.
While the two-day grace period is a good approach to due dates, it can get out of hand (often in First-Year Composition courses), but this semester I am setting up Blackboard to close the assignment right at the end of the grace period, instead of letting those two days stretch much further. It will likely create more work as I field students’ emails requesting to turn in late work, but this should result in students getting in the habit of turning in work on time. I am also working to improve my teaching by simplifying assignments where possible. I have finally learned that a course calendar and schedule that looks reasonable in August can often be crowded in November, so paring down without sacrificing rigor is the goal.
Professional Goals
My professional goals, as far as teaching goes, are rather simple:
1. To keep current with pedagogy as it pertains to technology (generative AI, multimedia tools, etc.).
2. To continue to reflect on my courses and adjust course content – assignments and course policies – to keep up with the world as it constantly changes.
3. To expand my scholarship production. In the past, I have focused on presenting my work at conferences. The pandemic showed the flaws in this focus. While I continue to watch for likely conferences, I also watch wpa-announcements for potential writing opportunities. I have signed up to review books for Programmatic Perspectives. I am in the early formative stages of researching a history of social media that compares older with newer platforms, drawing parallels and attempting to make predictions on their future (for example, comparing Fark with Reddit, comparing LiveJournal with Facebook).