Since many students approach professional writing with the assumption that it is a dry and uninteresting topic, incorporating unexpected and fun assignments keeps them engaged and interested. At the same time these “fun” assignments need to be pedagogically sound and clearly relevant to course goals. Developing such assignments can be a challenge, but in my experience they have been worthwhile additions to the course. For example, in my technical writing class I brought in a model kit for a ship. Before introducing the project I cut up the directions. When I gave the students the kit I handed out the directions in random order. The class then had to work together to assemble the instructions and the model. On the second day of class I gave them the complete instructions, and they used those to complete the project. Students were then asked to reflect on the purpose of the project, which they did in reading responses and class discussion. My purpose in assigning this activity was threefold: to show the importance of good documentation, to demonstrate the importance of community and collaboration, and to provide an analogy for the collaborative writing process. The reflections that I received and our class discussion provided evidence that each student had made at least one of these connections on their own. The activity not only helped the students make concrete connections between the creation of a physical object and the writing process, but it also helped them look at technical writing from a different perspective. They were able to learn important concepts and have fun in the process. Student response to assignments like this one continue to reinforce my decision to become a teacher.

Becoming a Teacher: My History

My interest in becoming a teacher began early. At age five I asked my mother why she wasn’t a teacher, because I had decided to be one. At age fourteen, after reading an obscure anthropology report, I decided that I wanted to be a college professor. By the time I finished high school my aptitude in English led me to the decision that I wanted to be an English professor. I began my career in higher education assured of this decision. Oddly, my first experience as a teacher was not in English but rather in the rhetoric of body image and identity. During my first year as a graduate student in Women’s Studies, an instructor invited me to be a guest lecturer for her course, Women in Society. Familiar with my research in the area and having seen me give presentations in courses where I was a graduate student, she felt that my understanding of the topic might generate more student interest than what she had seen in her previous teaching of the subject. Needless to say I was thrilled. The opportunity to present my research to an audience unfamiliar with the topic encouraged me to develop an approach that would capture the interests of students who, for the most part, were taking this course as an elective. The night before my lecture, I paced my apartment, dictating into a microphone the points that I would cover and through verbal brainstorming, came up with a strategy to capture the students’ attention.

The next morning I awoke nervous and excited, ready to test my first lesson plan. I entered the classroom and after the requisite introductions started with an interactive assignment. I asked the students to write down three adjectives to describe me, someone they had never met before. As they provided me with the adjectives that they had written, I wrote them on the board and then started with the one that most intrigued me. Several students had provided the adjective “smart.” When I asked why they had chosen that particular descriptor, the students replied that my glasses indicated that I must be intelligent. When I replied that by that logic people with poor eyesight must be intelligent, I saw the lights going off in their eyes, the moment when you know you’ve reached someone. In that moment I experienced the thrill of teaching.

Of course a guest lecture is decidedly different from the day-to-day rigors of teaching. However, I learned my most important lessons that day: effective teaching engages students and requires an approach that relies on previous knowledge. In other words, teaching to some extent relies on translation--taking information that students are already familiar with and relating the information that we want to convey to that previously attained knowledge. Since then I have used that strategy frequently, relating concepts of the rhetorical situation to information already familiar to them. For example, my discussion of writing styles is accompanied by a discussion of styles of clothing, relating what one might wear on a certain occasion to the expectations of speaking and writing in similar situations. The underlying approach is audience awareness, something that we teach our students but must also contemplate in the teaching of those same students. Over the years I’ve dedicated time to getting to know my students and thus, know my audience. With each group of students I tailor my approach to fit their needs and previous knowledge. Most importantly, I learn from my students how to be a more effective teacher.

For the past eight years I have had the privilege of learning from my students and sharing my knowledge with them. During this time I have gained a range of teaching experience in a variety of settings: the University of South Carolina, Purdue University, and Ivy Tech Community College; face to face and computer based classrooms; and several different courses. Beginning as a Women’s Studies teaching assistant at the University of South Carolina, I then continued on to Purdue where I began teaching face-to-face English courses, including business and technical writing, multimedia writing, business writing for entrepreneurs, and freshman composition. In addition to my face-to-face teaching, I have taught extensively in the online writing environment of Purdue’s distance education courses in professional writing. I also have experience teaching introductory composition at Ivy Tech, a local community college. My diverse teaching background has provided me with the opportunity to interact with students on different levels and to develop teaching approaches that accommodate students based on the learning environments and the student population’s needs.

A constant in all of my teaching has been my conscious effort to get to know my students and their particular learning styles, reconsidering and revising my teaching strategies to best suit their needs and abilities. My awareness of my students as individuals with different needs, personalities, and academic backgrounds provides me with a base for approaching each classroom community. And I strongly believe that classrooms constitute discourse communities that develop and change throughout the course of a semester, a situation that also requires me to change and adapt with them.

I base my approach to teaching on one important concept--reciprocal learning. When I approach my students I don’t assume that I am simply a bearer of knowledge; I am also a student of my experience with them. While one cannot completely decenter a classroom, given that I have the power to assign their grades, I do my best to make my classroom a learning environment based on reciprocity. I share my knowledge with them, but in doing so, I also learn from them, improving my methods of teaching and my own understanding of the knowledge and skills that I share with them. Thus, my teaching relies on a pedagogy of collaborative learning and student engagement. Students get to know one another and me as people engaged in a learning process that includes various strategies of designing texts that are rhetorically situated, learning contemporary writing strategies, engaging in multimedia development, and using online and face-to-face communication effectively.

Developing Situational Teaching Methods

During my teaching career, I have learned that each course requires a different approach and challenge. For example, teaching freshman involves helping them make the transition from the classrooms of secondary education to that of higher education. Since we are often the teachers with whom they have the most contact (due to smaller class size), our jobs frequently place us in the role of a guide in the unfamiliar territory of the university in addition to our role as teacher. Teaching juniors and seniors in business and technical writing requires more stringent guidelines and expectations as they prepare for writing and collaborating in the workplace, particularly its increasing reliance on continually developing technologies. In multimedia writing classes, also primarily comprised of juniors and seniors, I stress the importance of engaging new technologies and learning to understand a variety of new media as writing tools.

Teaching distance education classes that occur exclusively online provides the greatest challenge. My students and I rely entirely on email communication and blogging to get to know one another. Consequently, I must adapt my teaching methods to account for this distance and spend considerably more time getting to know my students, just as they must spend more time and energy getting to know their teacher and each other. While I focus on collaborative learning in the face-to-face classroom, it becomes even more crucial in the online learning environment. Collaboration requires students to continually and actively engage with at least several other students in the class. These groups also communicate with me extensively and allow me to develop methods that better address their needs and expectations.

Using Technology in the Classroom

My experience as a writing teacher has taught me to use the tools available to me as way of engaging students in critical thinking, collaboration, and innovation. These tools also provide me with the ability to spark interest in my students. I have been lucky enough to have the opportunity to independently design courses in which I use my experience as a teacher and learner to develop course projects and activities that both interest my students and fulfill learning outcomes. For example, in my multimedia writing classroom, one of the major projects is the creation of a documentary film. Most of my students have never had the opportunity to engage in such an endeavor and are intrigued by the notion of using this in the writing classroom. Since I believe that unified focus on a topic provides students with the ability to learn a variety of writing strategies and genres by building on previously acquired knowledge, the documentary film project is divided into numerous steps in which they learn research methods and genres throughout the project. These group projects involve secondary research in the topic chosen, proposal writing, website development, audience analysis, primary research through interviews and questionnaires, raw footage capturing, storyboarding, editing, creation of promotional materials, and ultimately, presentation to the intended audience. Students are required to advertise their film, and at the end of the semester I arrange for a viewing time and space where Purdue students and community members join us in the film premiere. For one of my classes students were able to present their films in the recently renovated Lafayette Theater. Not only do students learn how to write in different styles, genres, and media; but they also have the opportunity to see their projects as “real” world constructions, engaging audience and actually seeing and hearing their responses.

In technical and business writing I use a similar approach to technology. New media technologies are becoming increasingly important in the workplace. As a result it is important that students are not only familiar with the technology but also the rhetorical strategies needed to create well composed and usable documents. Students in both my business and technical writing classes research new writing technologies and compose documents that could be used to inform management and coworkers. Typically students begin this process by writing a white paper based on primary and secondary research. Their white papers are not only thoroughly researched and succinctly articulated but also incorporate rhetorically relevant visuals and carefully considered layout and design. In the technical writing classes these white papers are then followed up by usability studies to determine user needs. This culminates in user documentation in a multimedia formats such as PowerPoint and Flash video. As with all of the classes that I teach, the white papers and documentation are made available to an external audience. Their documents are available on the course website and are at times available on the software application site. They are also submitted to document sharing sites such as DocStoc, SlideShare, and YouTube. In the case of documentation created for an actual client, these documents are distributed to the organization as well.

Engaging Students with Innovative Assignments

As previously mentioned, I try to engage my students by making the learning experience enjoyable by incorporating unusual assignments. As with the unexpected assignment of the model ship, students are surprised and often excited by the opportunity to work “outside the box.” In my multimedia writing class, in which students often enter with the expectation that multimedia writing is synonymous with digital writing, on the first day of class I provide them with crayons and beige paper, the same materials that we received in kindergarten. These materials were often our first engagement with multimedia writing. Students are asked to define multimedia writing using the materials provided. This assignment immediately challenges their preconceived definition of multimedia writing. They are then able to approach course assignments with open minds and really consider how multimedia writing can be defined.

I have approached similar challenges in my other writing classes. Because many of our students increasingly rely on the internet for their research, it is important that they are able to evaluate the credibility of their sources and make informed decisions on whether or not to include these sources in their writing. At times it can be difficult to convince students that just because something has been published online does not necessarily mean it is credible. One obvious way to circumvent the use of questionable resources is to require students to only rely on peer-reviewed scholarship. However, given the changes in the way information is accessed, this is no longer a realistic requirement. Further complicating matters, my students are usually researching emerging communication technologies that have not been extensively explored in peer-reviewed journals. Thus, it is essential that they learn to carefully evaluate source information located on the Web. Furthermore, resources are not always text-based but are instead presented in audio/visual formats.

My approach to this challenge is to again interject an unusual assignment that includes an element of fun. The research activity that I assign involves an audio recording that was allegedly taken from a customer complaint line. The recording features a humorous message complaining about the change in Jimmy Dean sausage packages. Students get a good laugh when I play it for them in class, and then they set out to try to determine its validity. Since I list it on the calendar as “super secret research activity,” few students are absent that day. The true challenge of the activity is that there is no way to confirm its validity via the Internet and so far no student has tried to confirm it by actually calling Jimmy Dean. Students locate sources that they use to support their claim that it is either valid or not and then reflect on the research process. I also encourage them to rely on their instincts. Ultimately we discuss whether or not citing the resource, without being able to determine its credibility would be worth the possible damage that it could do to their own ethos as a writer and researcher. Their reflections usually indicate that using such a resource would not be worth the possibility that it would be detrimental to the overall credibility of their own text. Students have fun, and they learn about the challenges of online research.

Reflecting on the Learning Process

I believe that effective teaching must also invite students to reflect on their work. In all of my classes I assign frequent reading responses and activity reflections, such as the one mentioned above. In addition, students keep project logs in which they are continually documenting and reflecting on their work. An additional reflection memo is assigned at the end of each major project. Students are asked to comment on what they did well, what they could have done better, how the project progressed, and what they learned in the process. Over the years I have found that some of the most profound evidence of student learning has come from these reflections. As a teacher I also find reflection to be an important learning tool. For me, and hopefully for my students, these written reflections reinforce what has been learned and provide evidence of our evolving education.

I don’t believe that anyone ever becomes an expert teacher, just as one could never be an expert of life. We learn and accumulate wisdom that are invaluable to us as teachers. Learning and wisdom, based on experience, ideally improve our teaching just as, hopefully, learning and wisdom improve our approaches in life. However, teaching, like life, is a learning experience and as long as we are teachers we grow and change with each group of students, with each learning environment.