Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching opens with the premise that I teach students who enter the classroom with writing experience, not a subject like rhetoric or a craft like professional or academic communication. Students enter classes 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 experience on which to build. This approach helps me better understand the strengths and challenges each student brings into the classroom, and develops an ethos of care and understanding by valuing the composing activities in which students already engage. When students share that they compose email messages, social media posts, or text messages, I can lead the class to examine generic expectations emerging around different messages and to identity the audience, purpose, content, and style of genres. This rhetorical approach to communication practices both values students as writers and demonstrates the rhetorical approach to composing that I bring to any writing-intensive course.

My teaching philosophy is refined by demonstrating that I join students in a community of learners. I seek to facilitate the advancement of students’ composing practices through instruction, practice, feedback, and iteration. While I may serve as the class subject matter expert on rhetorical agency and technical communication, I willingly share my own learning experiences, including my writing challenges and successes, to demonstrate my approach to scholarship and pedagogy as learning for life. Rather than focusing on lecture as a primary instructional strategy, I seek to engage students in discussions and dialogues on composing strategies writ broadly. These discussions occur both synchronously in face-to-face classes and online in synchronous and asynchronous classes using Socratic dialogue, discussion forums, blog posts, social media, and other technologies. Content of such discussions ranges widely, but I encourage students to make claims, recognize warrants, provide evidence, and generate counter claims about specific strategies like document design, the ethics of coding and data visualizations, and use of language and imagery appropriate to subjects, media, purposes, and audiences. Facilitating such dialogues provides opportunities for students to engage in community learning experiences in which all learners — students and teachers — work and learn together.

Nurturing a community of learners reflects my approach to composing as a collaborative activity, practiced in social contexts. As a result, my synchronous and asynchronous classroom environments are not only vocally collaborative, but also textually and technologically collaborative using hardware and software. I prefer to teach composition-intensive face-t0-face classes in a computer lab, where the technologically mediated experience of composing is obvious and clearly displayed. I require students to compose in collaborative settings using Google Docs in group composing activities, collaborative synchronous and asynchronous composing sessions, and peer review sessions. I consider teaching a collaboration among students and teachers, and I use technological mediation, in both face-to-face and online instruction, to model this understanding. Like my students, I also engage in collaboration by reviewing drafts in Google Docs, providing feedback that can be seen not only by the writer, but also by the writer’s composing partners. Doing so demonstrates that composing happens in social environments and provides feedback that other students may benefit from reviewing.

I focus attention on the collaborative, social contexts of composing because I seek to prepare students to compose in workplace contexts where collaboration is expected. Nearly two decades of experience working in higher education marketing and communication informs this collaborative approach. Workplace composing necessarily happens in social contexts, often imbued with undertones (or overtones) of workplace politics, power differentials, and personality conflicts. Workplace contexts regularly require joint authorship and the sharing of rhetorical agency while navigating these undertones. I seek to create a classroom environment where collaboration among weaker and stronger composers, among native and non-native English speakers, and among speakers of multiple Englishes, is practiced, valued, and honed. I trust such activities prepare students to compose in workplace environments, even when their composition assignments are academic in nature.

I operationalize my philosophy of teaching by assigning compositions that ask students to address specific problems originating outside my classes. For example, in a class focused on academic composing, assignments focus on solving a public problem. In a class focused on business and professional communication, assignments focus on addressing professional and workplace problems. In both contexts, I create assignments that students have agency to shape, targeting problems and situations in their field, major, discipline, profession, or area of interest. I also encourage open conversations about social and political issues, providing opportunities for students to make and support their own claims about contemporary issues and to challenge claims made by others, either in or beyond the teaching environment. These conversations are planned around assignments toward scaffolding composing experiences from the conceptual to the practical. I regularly facilitate classroom and online conversations; given my preference for technology-mediated classrooms, I include online discussion expectations in classroom-based, in-class/online hybrid, and online learning environments.  

I seek to improve instruction with every class I teach. Beyond formal course evaluations, I provide time and space for students to share what worked and didn’t work in each class I teach. While power differentials between teacher and students necessarily influence feedback, I am pleasantly and regularly pleased that students willingly provide honest, critical feedback when asked. I trust and believe this comes as a result of facilitating a community of learners in which all voices, including dissenting opinions, are heard and valued. I reflect on feedback I receive and combine it with personal reflections on students’ progress to adjust learning activities, instructional design, assessment rubrics, teaching style and mode, and syllabi to ensure improvement. I seek out teachable moments in campus lectures and events, blog posts and news items, emerging scholarship, conference sessions, colleagues and students themselves, and I look to incorporate such moments into classroom discussions, readings, and assignments when possible. I seek to adapt to student needs, to adapt to the teaching environment, and to adapt to the contexts in which instruction occurs—political, socio-economic, technological, emotional, and intellectual—in each class I teach.

Teaching Experience

All courses taught at the University of Richmond.

ADED 301U Knowledge Management: Seminar in the Disciplines I

Develops advanced reading, writing, and research techniques, using a variety of disciplinary approaches. Requires students to read a range of primary and scholarly texts related to the content of the course, synthesizing them in assignments of varying medium, length, and purpose. Also requires students to locate, evaluate, and incorporate a wide range of research sources. Explicit writing instruction is central to the course.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Fall 2018 with topic of Network Society
  • First half of two-part common interdisciplinary seminar required of all School of Professional and Continuing Studies undergraduate students, regardless of major. Specific section topic selected by instructor.
  • Received University of Richmond Mobile Device Initiative grant to provide each student an iPad for the purpose of collaborating in networked environments and reflecting on the role of mobile in collaborative composing environments.

ENGL 112U Professional Communications

Learn how to use the art of persuasion to get what you want (and where you want to be) in the business world. Emphasis on professional writing (memos, letters, e-mails, reports) and oral presentations.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Spring 2008
  • Previous course requirement for applied undergraduate degrees in Paralegal Studies, Information Systems, and Human Resource Management.
  • Taught as an in-class/online hybrid at an extension campus for public safety personal completing degrees in HR Management with a minor in Leadership Studies.

ENGL 201U Critical Writing and Research I

Focuses on academic writing, critical reading, and research. Throughout the semester, requires students to write on a range of topics for a variety of purposes and audiences, emphasizing writing as a process. Introduce a broad array of texts that are intended to improve students’ critical reading skills. Includes training in research and proper methods of documentation.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Fall 2016
  • First of two-course sequence of first-year composition (FYC)-like courses. Focuses on composing in multiple genres and media for academic and non-academic purposes.
  • Taught using Google Drive as primary course-management using entirely digital composing, reflection, review, and assessment processes.

ENGL 202U Critical Writing and Research II

Focuses on academic writing, critical reading, and research, building on the skills developed in ENGL 201U. Requires students to write essays of varying length and purpose, culminating in a research-driven persuasive essay. Introduces a broad array of cultural texts that are intended to improve students’ critical reading and analytical skills. Includes additional training in research and documentation.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Spring 2018
  • Second of two-course sequence of first-year composition (FYC)-like courses. Focuses on composing in traditional and nontraditional genres and modes for academic purposes.

ENGL 203U Research Process

Covers the process of researching and writing a documented argument paper. Topics covered include forming a strategy, learning the library’s resources, incorporating evidence, avoiding plagiarism and writing correct citations.

  • Last taught: Fall 2013
  • Team-taught collaborative research and writing class focused on producing 8-10 pages of research-based academic composition.
  • Combines expertise of composition specialist and research librarian.

ENGL 349U/398U Tracking Contemporary Trickster

Examines archetypal tricksters in literature, mythology, and cultural history in an effort to identify contemporary tricksters. Begins study with Hermes, Eshu, Coyote and more, then shifts to identifying potential contemporary tricksters from across the globe. Analysis of old media, like texts and the oral tradition, and new media, like film and social media, fleshes out characteristics of the trickster archetype as it applies to the modern age.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Spring 2013
  • Selected Topics course (ENGL 398U) turned into permanent course following Academic Council approval.
  • Course focuses on a multimodal, multimedia, interdisciplinary approach to understanding the trickster principle and applying that understanding to tracing trickster behavior in contemporary society and culture.

ENGL 398U ST: Business & Professional Communication

Introduces a rhetorical approach to the techniques and types of communication in professional contexts, including correspondence and reports. Designed to strengthen skills of effective business and professional communication in oral and written modes across multiple media. Prepares students to write professionally for audiences within and outside a corporation or nonprofit enterprise.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Spring 2019
  • Selected Topics course (ENGL 398U) designed for junior- and senior-level majors in applied degrees: Human Resource Management, Information Security, IT Management, and Paralegal Studies.
  • Developed in response to request for professional communications course for applied majors seeking to seek promotion or advance in their careers.
  • Graduate session for professional secondary educators planned for Spring 2020.

ENGL 598U ST: Business & Professional Communication

Introduces a rhetorical approach to the techniques and types of communication in professional contexts, including correspondence and reports. Designed to strengthen skills in effective business and professional communication in oral and written modes across multiple media. Prepares students to write professionally for audiences within and outside a corporation or nonprofit enterprise.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Summer 2020
  • Selected Topics course serves as an elective for students in the Master of Human Resource Management and Master of Liberal Arts programs.
  • Developed in response to a need to professional communication coursework for working professionals earning advanced degrees.

ENGL 598U ST: Theories of Modern Rhetoric

Survey of contemporary theories of rhetoric. Covers the proliferation of rhetorical theories surrounding changing understanding of rhetorical agency, from personal to social to mechanistic to assemblage. Special focus on post-human agency as it applies to composing.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Fall 2019
  • Graduate course (ENGL 598U) offered to professional secondary educators
  • Provides post-master’s students credentials to teach dual-enrollment secondary/post-secondary coursework in partnership with local community college.

HUM 346U The History of Human Expression

Examination of the arts in their wide variety: visual, literary, plastic and melodic.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Spring 2012
  • 6-hour course, one of ten courses in the Weekend College interdisciplinary studies major.
  • Traced broad strokes of creative expression from the pre-Hellenic Greeks to the postmodernists.

HUM 598U ST: Research Methods

Introduces a range of research methodologies used in humanities and social science fields. Covers literary, cultural, and historical methods of inquiry along with empirical qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods. Addresses digital research and information literacy through reading, interpreting, and evaluating scholarship. Provides approaches to planning, implementing, and evaluating research.

  • Sample syllabus
  • Last taught: Fall 2020
  • Graduate methods course offered as the initial class in the Master of Liberal Arts.
  • Designed to be broadly applicable across multiple programs, introducing both humanistic and social scientific research approaches and methods.