What Teaching Writing Means to Me

Today one of my students called me a “teacher.” Not a GTA and not a professor, but a teacher. It gave me that clichéd warm, fuzzy feeling people sometimes get when they realize they’ve done a good deed. It made me understand that what is important to me is how much students are learning about writing and communicating.

My definition of writing includes communicating ideas effectively with the written word. Writing, to be effective, is when someone understands how to transfer thoughts and ideas into coherent words that can communicate clearly. My definition allows “effectively” to be interchangeable with “rhetorically.” I think awareness of the canons (particularly audience and delivery) and the incorporation of Aristotle’s modes of persuasion (logos, ethos, pathos) are a way to approach most writing situations in order to be effective.

My responsibility for teaching writing is therefore a consequential one. I feel that students must be prepared for university writing, as well as social and professional writing. UWM is different than my first experience teaching where students took a first-year rhetoric and composition course but would not take other courses that focused on that until junior year. Here students have two courses to help prepare them. Because my 101 courses cannot focus on one particular type of writing (i.e. how will you write for your various occupation?), my goal is to teach rhetorical awareness and rhetorical analysis as something that can be used in any situation. If students are educated and aware of how others are communicating with them, they can join in the conversation and avoid become passive agents.

I want students to be able to call on this skill to approach any type of communication whether verbal, visual, or written.

So it would be incorrect of me to say I only teach writing; my practices reveal that I attempt to teach students how to communicate effectively while focusing on their writing as practice.

My place in the university is to educate the next generation to be functional citizens that matter by teaching them to communicate in a common form. Despite society’s growing digital reliance, writing is still everywhere. To write effectively means that they can exchange ideas and opinions, they can create change, and if they decide to, they can choose not to stand out.

This responsibility forces me to question my actions continuously (which is a good thing.) What if I am teaching students incorrectly or poorly preparing them? What if I am not communicating effectively with them? What if my bias or influence is negatively affecting their thinking and growing? The anecdote about my student from this morning reveals that I enjoy teaching because it is doing some sort of good; I’m not just a cog in the machine but am hopefully making a positive difference in a few lives. And the impact of a teacher is unmeasured—that influence can affect self-worth, determine success in some contexts, and can invite new or different ways of thinking that encourage intellectual growth. But my questions above reiterate how careful I (and others) must be when choosing how we will make this difference in our students’ lives.

One way I choose to make this difference is by attempting to change my pedagogy as their lives outside of academia change in regards to technology. If they know how to rhetorically communicate, they should be able to adapt to the writing spaces/situations that new technologies create. This is a distinction for me: I will teach them a set of skills that can hopefully transfer to writing on/with these technologies, but I will not teach them how to use these technologies.

My responsibility, therefore, has become quite complicated. The composing process has surely changed. For example, computers allow for words to be recorded faster in response to the bombardment of thoughts, and audio technologies can translate verbal sounds into written words. The internet has also changed the concept of audience; audience awareness isn’t always possible when you compose on the web. Similarly, communication has become instantaneous (texting, emails) and the written word can have a longer life (stored in several places without making physical copies, not as easily damaged as paper, harder to completely lose data than a piece of paper). I’m not sure how these characteristics are or could be changing writing, and that’s why the majority of my research interests are about these concepts. If they are changing writing, I must learn how so I can adapt my pedagogies to reflect my students’ needs.

I also need to be aware of these changes in communication in order to teach in a way that invites students to write naturally. While writing for particular genres might be difficult for them at the university, I never want the act of writing to be unfamiliar.

As a teacher (not a GTA or a professor), I have the responsibility to be aware of how my students and colleagues are using language and then them make students aware of how they can be more effective when communicating in these ways. In order to do this, I must remain current with research, practices, and technologies. If this is not done, I am neglecting the responsibilities that I took on by accepting this job.

Reflection

This post was supposed to aim to include our class readings and discussions. But I am not exactly certain how most of our readings tie into my ideas. Certainly when I read Benjamin, my focus is more on understanding than how it could relate to my teaching. Often I don’t theoretically think about my practices, which something I’m working (struggling) to improve.

There are two texts that I want to closer examine in relation to my ideas of what a classroom should consist of:

Baym’s Personal Connections in the Digital Age was interesting to me because it discussed how these online spaces could be affecting the way people approach writing. She complicated my ideas by bringing in identity and community to the writing process. It makes me question if teaching rhetorical concepts is enough for students to communicate effectively in communities they are unfamiliar with and enough for them to recognize how the identity they are creating might be communicating more than they are aware of.

Brooke’s Lingua Fracta was fascinating to me because it had a rhetorical focus to how teachers should approach writing in digital spaces. I am most interested in the ideas of persistence as a new way of learning and also how delivery can incorporate appearance. If I choose to buy into what Brooke is saying, it would force me to rethink the details and examples I use in class to teach the canons. (It makes me wonder why the two canons most often neglected in the composition classroom are the two that I also think need to be revived. And my final project idea involves a rethinking of audience in online spaces. So I already want to rethink more than half of the canons.)

What is very apparent to me is that while I’m aware of my responsibility as a writing teacher, I am not yet aware of how to incorporate these new ideas into my pedagogies. So, in response to my final line above: I need to develop an understanding much more quickly or I risk neglecting the responsibilities I have placed on myself.