Download a .pdf copy of my teaching statement here.
Introduction
When I started working on political campaigns, I found myself thrust into fast-paced environments with little-to-no formal training, just an urgent need to navigate the situation at hand. Every time I wrote a speech, a response to an issues questionnaire or jokes for the host of some town committee’s comedy night, I made notes for a makeshift manual for staff, volunteers, or whoever else might work with me in and need to move quickly between nuanced rhetorical contexts. I didn’t know it then, but that manual was the seed for future syllabi and teaching practices that would reflect my experience and the social justice issues that brought me to politics and government in the first place.
After I started teaching, I again found myself in surprising new circumstances. On three separate occasions, I took over a class at or before midterm, when my colleagues could not finish the semester. Those situations didn’t allow for a perfect application of theory, and it wouldn’t have been fair to shift course midstream without buy in from most of the students. My go-to methods wouldn’t have been effective; I had to prioritize flexibility.
I owe a monumental debt to Freire, hooks, and Byron Hawk, but I take Hawk’s warning that “the application of a pre-set strategy inevitably becomes law when implemented in the first-year course”[1] and seek to develop complex and ever-evolving approaches. What follows is an explanation of how my priorities, based on my experiences and Hawk’s warning, guide my teaching.
Flexible Design and Meeting Students Where They Are
Like many of my colleagues, I rely on labor-based grading to make sure that students meet the learning objectives on their terms as much as mine, but I also work to design assignments and frame classwork in a way that meets students where they are.
I’ve started labeling a research-driven, scholarly assignment “The Big Paper,” a move I’ve borrowed from Prof. Sarah Trembath and others. Students are likely to think of the assignment in similar terms regardless of the labor, and the title matches the tone of the work we do around this paper to demystify academic writing.
Rather than provide a prompt for The Big Paper, I ask students to adopt the role of scholarly researchers, while I serve as the “editorial board” for a hypothetical journal. We come up with the aims, scope, and submission guidelines for the journal as a class.
I’ve found many students struggle to differentiate between the scholarly articles they are required to read and the journals that publish those texts. This assignment furthers their understanding of the genre, but it also illuminates the work their professors do outside of the classroom. We often forget that students don’t’ arrive with a manual on how research institutions function, which, for students, is a vital part of audience awareness.
Despite some early confusion, students seem to enjoy having a hand in creating the rhetorical situation. It also turns out that a “revise and resubmit” response from “the board” has been quite useful in encouraging ambitious revisions and avoiding a singular focus on line edits.
This role play is only one dialog necessary for the assignment. Students are credited for the labor they do producing drafts and responding to each other’s work, but they also choose ways to engage beyond assignments and in-class activities by choosing texts and labor that will help respond to “the board’s” feedback. They might, for example, journal about applying Sandra Giles “Reading Games” to potential sources for the paper or map the major voices in the conversation they are entering. This rewards labor tailored specifically to individual needs.
Antiracist Pedagogy, Diversity, and Inclusion
Labor-based grades are a well-publicized strategy of antiracist pedagogy, which, aside from the obvious moral concerns, has become accepted as effective pedagogy. Aside from this strategy, I use several moves adapted from an antiracist faculty learning community session in spring 2021 and those aggregated by Brown’s Harriet W. Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning.
Right away, I announce my antiracist identity early through my bio and course materials, but the class engages in antiracist discussions and activities throughout the term. For instance, we explore code meshing/switching and multiple Englishes before a major assignment for which students choose their audiences and personas. This makes explicit—more than with just personal rapport—that students are welcome to bring their identities to our work and address the many forms and consequences of racism.
A example of this is my “multimodal rhetorical analysis” assignment, which asks students to produce a presentation, video, or podcast analyzing an example of American music. There is no prescribed audience; students may aim their analyses at other students learning rhetorical concepts or at music scholars who often overlook a certain genre. One student, inspired by a video essay on Afrofuturism, made a case, in a podcast, for a Kendrick Lamar song as a subversive expression of Black joy. In a reflection, he reported that he would not have been comfortable performing that particular lyrical analysis if not for our model texts and class discussions.
The classroom dynamic produced by antiracist strategies is, of course, also inclusive of international, ESL, and neurodiverse students. Many people cannot rely on heady discussion, at least not alone, to meet our learning objectives, so I use detailed agendas, artifacts (charts and slides), and different modes of communication so that concepts are never exclusively delivered verbally and engagement is never exclusively verbal. These strategies allow more students to contribute.
An example of this kind of move is shifting discussion of scholarly texts from breakout groups (in Zoom) to a shared Google Sheet. Rather than prompt students to discuss the texts’ aims, methods, and materials verbally, I assigned them cells of a sheet to fill in (making sure to include an “instructor’s notes” column to clarify, correct, and further contextualize). Chinese students who had struggled with informal, fast-paced discussion—and now had time and a concrete task—made valuable contributions to the document and better grasped the key takeaways posted to Canvas, since they had partly produced those points themselves. There was a noticeable shift in those students’ understanding of scholarly writing conventions, which showed up in the next major assignment. While this was a product of forced distance learning, this method can be adapted for the return to campus.
Working in Developing Mediums and Operating Kairotically
As I mentioned, I share Hawk’s (and Freire’s) dim view of universalization and his assertion that methods should address “online contexts and communities” produced by students. These contexts are not static, however; they change rapidly and require methods that make use of them rather than ignore or, worse, discriminate against them.
One byproduct of the current pandemic is that more first-year students show up with greater digital literacy and experience with IT resources. New strategies should welcome that knowledge and experience, and as the contexts change, I will operate kairotically, even if that means abandoning previously justifiable methods. For example, I’ve found students more willing and desirous of moving our dialog to shared documents or short videos, where our conversation happens asynchronously. In the past, I’ve demanded that dialog happen in person, a practice I plan to modify when we return to campus.
Avoiding pedagogy as “law” has allowed me the same opportunity for discovery I try to create for students, and this willingness to abandon or adapt methods has helped in some of the toughest teaching situations. One semester, for example, a majority of students seemed almost incapable of focusing on process before getting feedback on a draft that “counted,” so I did not require a draft of the next major assignment, instead offering the chance to revise afterthey received a grade and detailed feedback. The resulting conversations never would have happened if I had stuck to a rigid interpretation of process pedagogy and completely deemphasized “product.”
Situating This Statement
Going forward, the exact execution of these methods might change, sometimes overnight, but these priorities will not. I hope you will view this statement as a snapshot of my experience and practice at this moment. Two of the lessons of the past year and a half are that we can find ourselves in complicated, unforeseen circumstances and that teaching requires nimble and flexible thinking.
[1] From A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity
