I came to TAMUCC to teach and develop courses in technical communication and writing studies, and to work with students interested in writing and technical/professional writing programs. In my job application materials, I described three elements of my teaching philosophy:
I am still committed to each of these principles, and find that they have intensified in my online and face-to-face teaching, coming to new life as I have worked with my students at TAMUCC.
An example of this sort of intensification is how I teach students to use and select writing technologies rhetorically. I have long described my focus on agency as meeting students where they are and helping them learn to experiment and try new things with texts. A lot of my students’ multimodal work will be their first project of that particular kind, such as a technical and professional writing assignment that asks students to apply lessons in document design to create a visualizations about professional writing (Tab 5). Other students take the chance to develop advanced multimodal presentations and even simple video games. In my Editing course (Tab 7), students experience the variety of tools and processes that editors use to collaborate and produce texts. Students in my online Writing for the Web course must research, evaluate, select the right content management system to meet their rhetorical needs and skill levels as they build their portfolios or websites, and this is often their very first blog. Some students have even continued to adapt their class portfolios into professional websites that they use and update after graduation.
My focus on developing students’ sense of agency and technical-rhetorical skills has also changed in specific ways. With larger advanced writing class sizes and the particular student body at TAMUCC, who often may not even own their own computers at home, I have committed to building tutorials and resources for my students to learn the functional and technical literacies that support their communication goals where I once would have handled things ad-hoc in a workshop as they come up or by simply referring students to external materials. For Writing for the Web I built a series of markup exercises/tutorials that help students learn HTML/CSS skills and basic concepts of content management that will serve them as future web authors or content developers. To help students create accessible multimodal reports in Technical and Professional Writing, I have built scaffolding assignments that both walk them through the technical processes of modifying and creating stylesheets in Word and help them learn how to work with figures, lists, headings, and styles in ways that will serve them beyond the class (Tab 5). As I shifted these activities into my online courses, It has been especially important to test and iterate on them in order to ensure students can do them on their own, without the guiding hand of the professor in a classroom workshop.
In my instruction I try to introduce students to the genres and rhetorical situations they’ll encounter in their professional lives. ENGL 3301 has iterated in response to student feedback and achievements over the three years I have taught it. In the first semester, I introduced a “writing in professions” focus to the course which has become a standard structure for other 3301 courses. Originally, the course included four projects, but thorough student feedback and reflection, we have arrived at a structure and pace that online and face-to-face students seem to flourish. Currently, the course centers around a broad overview of professional writing and two research projects: the Reference to Writing in Your Field and Report on Writing in Your Field projects (Tab 5). Both of these projects have received positive student feedback (Tab 10); at the same time they inspire quality work, as evidenced by the included samples.
I have developed new syllabi and courses every year, including undergraduate courses such as Writing for the Web (Tab 6), Writing for Social Media, and Editing (Tab 7), as well as a graduate course, Writing across Digital Media (Tab 8). While each of these courses prominently name “writing” in the title, I ask students to work with multiple media and a variety of technologies in order to help them engage the complex, situated, and multimodal nature of rhetorical work in professional or networked environments. To model the sorts of writing, design, and technical delivery I assign students, I create born-digital assignment or project descriptions for many of their tasks. Writing for the Web students must turn a previously-written paper into a website, and the assignment description is delivered using Google Sites rather than a handout. Using the same tools that I ask students to experiment with enables me to engage with them beyond the moment of instruction or feedback. I am able to share experiences and strategies with them as they are struggling to master planning, arrangement, style, multimodality, and delivery. They see me as a web writer or editor, working through the same processes that I am asking them to inhabit. I encourage this by using asynchronous and synchronous media together; with the chat-based collaboration tool Slack I can provide in-the-moment answers to copyediting homework or have thoughtful discussions about web writing as students are reading (see syllabus description of Slack, Tab 7). Importantly, using these tools also prepares students for life after Blackboard.
Finally, I ask my students to reflect, drawing specific connections between their expectations and experiences in a course, what they learned and made, and their future academic or professional goals. Metacognitive writing of this kind (Tabs 5, 6, 7) allows them to build connections across courses, across disciplines, and across experiences, and encourages a healthy habit of critical reflection on what they’re doing.