Statement of Teaching Philosophy
From CannedWiki
Much of my motivation as a teacher and researcher of writing has been a result of my successes and failures as a writer. I struggled as a writer in my first literature courses while I excelled in creative writing. Why was I succeeding as a writer in one situation but failing in another? This disparity in experiences with writing is how my interest in writing studies began. The simple answer was that I wasn’t aware of the discursive conventions used to write about literature. The rhetorical features of a narratives, of course, differed from those in a literary analysis essay. After all, I had spent a lifetime reading narrative, but I hadn’t read literary criticism. And my creative writing courses included explicit instruction in generic conventions. What I needed was the knowledge of how to meet the demands of this particular context. I needed to know how one thought, spoke, wrote about literature and participated within this community.
During this experience I saw my previous undergraduate work as a visual artist and filmmaker in a new light. Working with different technologies, media, and genres required learning the technical skills and conventions of discourse within a specific community of practice. So when it came to my students’ success in a required course such as first-year composition, I explored ways in which I could construct opportunities for students to write within communities. My initial answers are found in my Master’s thesis study of academic service-learning (AS-L) in first-year composition. In these courses, my students chose to work with one of roughly a dozen non-profit community agencies and organizations. I hoped that juxtaposing the academic writing they did in our course with that they did for the non-profits would help them see how writing was organized and valued within particular contexts and lead to the acquisition of a transferrable meta-level knowledge of discourse.
This focus on spaces of writing beyond the university dovetails my interests in the ways emerging information and communication technologies are allowing people to connect and move beyond early descriptions of internet users as “isolates” to today’s “netizens.” That is, technology mediates more and more of our daily lives and enables people to share and co-construct knowledge as members of affinity groups in extracurricular and self-sponsored settings that cut across cultural, racial, gender, political and economic boundaries. Most often this interaction and production takes place through text such as with blogs, wikis, and forums. Therefore, examining our relationships with and uses of writing technologies is possibly more important than ever before. By incorporating new media assignments into my teaching, students have had the opportunity to analyze and interact with texts composed in a variety of media as well as within a variety of communities; in addition, they actually produce their own new media texts and reflect on how they define writing by juxtaposing the texts produced in both their school and media-rich private lives. For example, in asking students to write researched articles for Wikipedia, students learned not just the technical skills that enable them to contribute to this global site of writing, but they also learned about the processes through which the community (and its sub-communities) collaborates on writing articles, establishing practices and generic conventions, and resolving conflicts. Students’ reactions have been overwhelmingly positive. Many students have responded along the following lines: “I have a whole new perspective about writing” and “He still taught us about writing and had us write, but it was in a way that was actually fun and made me think deeper about my writing.”
When I began teaching I knew I couldn’t ignore writing as a technical skill because students so often struggle with writing at this level, and in fact using new media heightens awareness of the technical dimensions of writing in positive ways because it occurs within a authentic writing situation. Primarily, however, my pedagogy necessarily focuses on communicating to students that writing is also a social skill—a way of building knowledge and participating in a community of writers. Be it working with a mentor to demystify disciplinary conventions, in a partnership with community members to help other improve their facility with English, or with an online community to write an encyclopedia, collaboration (and talk) plays a significant role in writing. My goals as a writing teacher, then, have been (and continue to be) for my students to learn about how writing technology shapes and is shaped by culture and how literate practices evolve over time within and through groups of people—collaborative matters through and through.
