Teaching Philosophy: A Work in Progress

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My philosophy of teaching opens with the premise that I teach students, not professional or academic communication. Students enter the classroom with years of writing and communication experience, and among the first goals of any course I teach is to guide students to recognize their existing practices as experiences on which to build. This approach…
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Technology as a Classroom Distraction for Students

Essay in Inside Higher Education by Mary Flanagan, distinguished professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth College and a fellow of The OpEd Project. Flanagan concludes with this plea: We need a culture change to manage our use of technology, to connect when we want to and not because we psychologically depend on it. Enough is…
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iPads in the Classroom

Rossing, J. P., Miller, W. M., Cecil, A. K., & Stamper, S. E. (2012). iLearning: The future of higher education? Student perceptions on learning with mobile tablets. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 12(2), 1-26. Retrieved from http://search.ebscohost.com/ Introduction Grounded in the assumption that “the future of the classroom, including learning activities, research,…
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Reading Notes: Miller, Bazerman & Popham walk into this blog…

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I appreciate the opportunity this week to reengage with Miller’s work on genre in “Genre as Social Action” and then to see those ideas carried forward into “Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre.” I encountered Miller last semester in an historical review of EDNA-based textbooks in composition studies. Miller’s ideas on the social aspects…
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Thoughts on Ethos

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I’m in the process of reading and annotating the text I’ve selected for my spring class, and I came across what I consider a great paragraph with a great message that I want my students to grasp and understand. The text is Everything’s an Argument with Readings, 6th edition, by Andrea Lunsford, John R. Ruszkiewicz,…
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On Reading “What We Know About ELA Teachers”

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Scherff, Lisa, and Debbie L. Hahs-Vaughn. “What We Know about English Language Arts Teachers: An Analysis of the 1999-2000 SASS and 2000-2001 TFS Databases.” English Education 40.3 (2008): 174-199. Print. Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) School and Staffing Survey (SASS) and the subsequent Teacher Follow-Up Survey (TFS), the authors seek…
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A Crisis – One of Many?

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During last Monday’s class, I shared that I felt I was in crisis. This is something I’ve felt since a particular professor spoke to the class. I don’t think the professor engendered the crisis, but the presentation’s unwillingness to leave the realm of theory—and my difficulty following what the professor had to say—resulted in a…
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