This portfolio provides a snapshot of my teaching and research in the Department of Rhetoric and Writing at the University of Texas. To give a sense of how I design and teach courses, I have included a statement of teaching philosophy, links to sample syllabi, and course evaluations along with a brief interpretation of the relevant data. (Links to recent course descriptions and syllabi are also available.) In this introduction, I would like to provide some context for these documents.
My statement of teaching philosophy reflects my thinking about writing instruction as civic engagement, important not only for training in written discourse, but in public exchanges of views and arguments essential to a democratic public sphere. My concerns with both argumentation and with the presentation of written discourse—the stylistic values and strategies available to writers—allow me to offer students flexible and fluid possibilities to the whole writing process.
The courses featured in the “syllabi” section indicate my range as a teacher. “E 398T Supervised Teaching in English” is a course designed to introduce graduate students to methods and theories of first-year writing instruction. “Intermediate Expository Writing” is a course in stylistics, “The Rhetoric of Courtship” is a topics-based course, and “Rhetoric and Writing” is a course in first-year writing designed to introduce basic strategies of writing and rhetoric.
All of these courses address controversial social issues, as well as approaches to writing from various civic and cultural perspectives. One assignment introduced students to rhetorical analysis by getting them to write about personals ads. This encouraged them to engage controversial material related to the topic of courtship situations, and helped them build arguments that were generated by specific texts on a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and gendered situations. I found this approach to rhetorical analysis particularly useful because it helped students to think about the situation of discourse provided by a relatively small cultural text. Students found the topic compelling and this made it fun for them to learn to look at the ads from a number of unfamiliar perspectives.
A more recent assignment for my first-year writing class introduced students to Political Compass, an online survey designed to help students become more aware of social and economic ideologies and their conflicts. By working through the survey together in class we were able to form a better understanding of the commitments, beliefs, and attitudes that form the social context for writing in civic situations.
Finally, I have included course evaluations along with a guide for interpreting this data. I have also given a sampling of student comments. Not all students contributed feedback and certain written responses were minimal. I only included ones that were most substantial.
