Michael's Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy has been shaped by my own varied experiences in rhetoric, composition, creative writing, and technology, which I seek to bring meaningfully into my classes. I engage with students in learning as we work to become more just, more aware, and more effective rhetorical agents. I see the labor of every class—from first-year composition to rhetoric to the history of text technologies—as developing students’ agency to interrupt the world and act critically as we work towards social justice. In order to create engaged classrooms that work toward social justice, my teaching is student centered, collaborative, and playful.

Student-Centered Networks

My teaching and my teaching philosophy are student centered with a focus on developing thinkers and writers who are intentional and impactful with their languaging practices. My teaching is structured on the idea of a rhetorical ecology—that we make meaning through our interactions with each other, our technologies, and our languages in network of intersecting relationship—where students inquire into their roles as people and agents in a world of fluid language. Students already bring their experiences, insights, and needs into the classroom, and I incorporate them into lessons, readings, assignments, and revisions to the class. To invite student knowledge and experiences into my rhetoric class I guide students through a curation practice where they select topics of interest and vote on two articles to incorporate into the content of the course.

This ecological framework encourages students to develop connections between what they want to say with the resources and technologies that are available to them, including the right mix of modes, mediums, and composing tools to meet those goals. Students in my Writing and Editing in Print and Online course work through their own ecologies as they enact a viral marketing campaign with print and digital materials. Working in teams throughout the semester, students identify a community, construct a proposal, and collaboratively enact an impactful DIY marketing campaign. Through guided inquiry, students seek out connections between each other and resources on campus such as the library, writing center, and digital maker spaces in their work. Many of my courses feature an ePortfolio, developed throughout the semester, to explicitly provide students the opportunity to connect the content of the class to their practices and learning through the selection and reflection upon their work and learning and presented in a cohesive way for an outside audience.

Dynamic and Collaborative

Students are challenged to move beyond their comfort levels in my highly dynamic classes through discussions on readings, group and individual exploratory activities, and assignments focused on student inquiry and exploration. A cornerstone of my approach to teaching is small group discussion, where I pose questions drawn from students’ discussion in prior classes and from informal writing ahead of and during the class period. I affirm their insights, individually and together, and challenge the assumptions that they bring. Much of the labor of classes is done collaboratively with guidance, structure, and questions from me. In my History of Text Technologies class, students collaborate in small groups and across the class to curate items for an online archive of text technologies and propose and develop exhibits out of the crowdsourced archive.

Playful

I see play as serious intellectual work and vitally important for teasing out and experiencing the rhetorical nature of composing. I encourage students to make and remake with a variety of materials and technologies to identify and respond to different contexts inside and outside of the classroom. In my sections of Research, Genre, and Context—a sophomore-level college composition class—students remediate their research projects into three new genres to see and experiences their choices and agency as composers, working across a number of constraints in materials and delivery to reach new audiences. I encourage students to think creatively and intentionally as they make with language and reflect on their experiences, and have students articulate their experiences within theoretical frameworks to support their learning.

Justice Oriented

Finally, I intentionally seek to create classrooms that work for social justice. I adopted labor-based grading contracts within my college composition classrooms, drawing on the anti-racist pedagogy developed by Asao Inoue, where labor is the basis of grades instead of an adherence to a subjective and hegemonic standard. I seek student feedback daily and work to adjust the classroom based on their experiences and expectations. I weave diversity within my courses crafting intellectual foundations from a variety of viewpoints and marginalized voices. I want the work of a class to continue to simmer with students as they go to their other classes prepared to take action, and to view their work in my classes as part of their learning process and development as writers and thinkers who are able to act meaningfully as they engage in their worlds.

Courses Taught

Western Kentucky University

ENG 506 - Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing: A asynchronous online graduate course that serves as a introduction to the field of professional and technical writing. Focused on scholarship of the field, with students assembling an ePortfolio of their academic and professional writing.

ENG 300 - Writing in the Disciplines: A research and writing class utilizing a teaching-for-transfer approach to college writing. Students interrogate their discourse communities, perform relevant research, and respond in relevant genres.

ENG 306 - Business Writing: An asynchronous online class focusing on business writing genres and practices,project management, and distance collaboration.

ENG 307 - Technical Writing: A face-to-face class focusing on technical writing genres and practices. Has a focus on collaboration and project management.

Florida State

Writing and Editing in Print and Online - Core course for the concentration in Editing, Writing, and Media in the English major. A highly collaborative advanced composition course where students individually and collaboratively composed and edited a variety of texts across a variety of print and digital mediums. Students worked with a variety of genres and theories, working to articulate a theory of composing accounting for differences between writing for screens, networks, and physical mediums.

Visual Rhetoric - This course focuses on images as texts, including photographs, illustrations, paintings, monuments, and museums. It will help students to “read” the visual, providing a critical vocabulary and a set of conceptual frameworks. Students will learn both how to analyze visual texts, for surface and encoded meaning, and how to compose visual texts, utilizing multiple media.

Rhetoric - Core course for the concentration in Editing, Writing, and Media in the English major. Covered rhetorical theory tracing the evolution and changes of the Western Rhetorical Tradition over its history.

What is a Text? - Advanced undergraduate course within the English major that is open to all concentrations. An inquiry-based course exploring textuality within a digital and networked world. Works at places of praxis inviting provocations to critique, study, and produce texts. Challenged students to consider historiography, materiality, and technology to situate themselves contextually and rhetorically to the making, circulating, and reading of texts.

History of Text Technologies - Core course for the concentration in Editing, Writing, and Media in the English major. This course offers an introductory survey of the history of various technologies that have been used to record and transmit cultural memory and experience across time and space. Focused primarily on a survey of past modes of textual creation. Challenged students to evaluate ways material form shapes rhetoric.

ENC 2135 - College composition course focused on teaching students research skills that allow them to effectively incorporate outside sources in their writing and to compose in a variety of genres for specific contexts. Utilized a teaching for transfer approach emphasizing keywords and relationships between the content of the class and students’ experiences.

ENC 1101 - Introduction to college composition that focuses on writing process and rhetorical awareness. Emphasized discussion, critical thinking, critical reading, analysis, and writing processes. Also worked with a teaching for transfer approach through which students identified, defined, and worked with keywords for understanding and approaching writing.

University of Nebraska at Omaha

ENGL 1160 - Taught both in person and asynchronously online, focusing on rhetorical analysis and argumentation strategies. Working with students as they learn and practice close reading, analysis, and summary of texts. Assisting students with crafting well-researched and reasoned arguments; analyzing texts rhetorically; and developing appropriate responses, in various genres and modes, to a variety of rhetorical situations.

ENGL 1150 - Taught a combined four sections of Composition I, implementing critical pedagogy through topics such as technology, food, disability, and literacy to focus on close reading, critical thinking, and writing. Worked with students as they developed, drafted, and revised essays, focusing on clarity of thought and organization. Cultivated collaborative and process-focused classrooms by developing portfolios with an emphasis on peer revision, discussion, genre, and audience.