Teaching Philosophy

Students often come into my writing classes thinking that I will teach them about “correctness,” i.e., how to avoid errors and produce “proper” English sentences. Instead, my courses are designed to frame language usage in terms of its effects in contexts—that is, why patterns of language appear the way they do and what purpose those patterns serve. My research on language and cognition has led me to organize my rhetoric and writing classroom as a space where students can investigate persuasion by learning to analyze the ways language guides thinking.

Central to my pedagogy is the belief that, by focusing on language, students can construct novel ways of addressing systemic problems. In my Writing about the Environment class—an upper-level class catering to environmental scientists, environmental engineers, and environmental justice majors—I have a project which asks students to come up with a novel metaphor or metonymy for understanding climate change. To prepare students for this project, we analyze a range of texts—from the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report to Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer Prize winning non-fiction work The Sixth Extinction to the 2021 Academy Award-nominated film Don’t Look Up—to see how different rhetors conceptualize climate change for their audiences using different domains of discourse. For example, w see that the IPCC report makes heavy use of economic language (e.g., carbon budget, balance, costs, benefits, trade-offs), and we think about how conceptualizing climate change as a comet in Don’t Look Up dismisses mitigation strategies and invites the idea that climate change is an unavoidable catastrophic event. To help us to understand different ways of conceptualizing climate change, we look at work on indigenous stewardship, some of which has been worked into the 2022 IPCC Sixth Assessment report, as well as work that seeks to metonymize climate change as interconnected with social problems (e.g., climate apartheid, climate refugee, carbon criminal, climate poverty). Drawing from their own knowledge, students construct short papers that propose a new phrase that helps us grasp an overlooked aspect of climate change. The class as a whole then combines these phrases to create a guidebook of new ways of viewing climate change. This project helps students to move past economic models of climate change that privilege richer countries and ignore the role of transnational corporations, and it empowers students to invent new ways and new language for understanding climate change. By focusing on language, the project offers an avenue for critical thinking that’s vital for effectively communicating the various aspects of climate change. If future environmental scientists and engineers are going to lead the way in sustainability and innovation, we need to foster a new, more audience-focused language for talking and thinking about climate change.

My classroom also helps students see how rhetorical moves within a genre are linguistically instantiated, encouraging them to build a repertoire of specialized language within a genre. In my Technical Writing class, for example, students develop persuasive and problem-oriented grant proposals that respond to real-world Request for Proposals (RFPs). A grant proposal is an example of a document that requires both specialized knowledge and an ability to communicate that specialized knowledge to a lay audience. Furthermore, they are typically composed of specific rhetorical moves, such as articulating problems, reporting previous research on a topic, proposing solutions, stating deliverables, and highlighting benefits. To help students understand how student and expert writers execute these rhetorical moves, I bring in example grant proposals and have students underline expressions that signal rhetorical moves. For example, expressions like There has been a considerable amount of research done on [topic] or Research on this topic shows [findings] signal movement into a reporting of previous research, and expressions like [author(s)] seek to [goal] and the [deliverable] will [benefit] signal movement into a discussion of benefits. We also discuss the role of shielding in academic and professional writing, e.g., the difference between We seek to understand and This project seeks to understand. While many of these set lexico-grammatical expressions may already be part of students’ discursive knowledge, being able to tie them to rhetorical moves help students—particularly international students and those who struggle with writing—to understand the grant proposal not simply as a large document with a lot of headings but as a persuasive document composed of rhetorical moves indexed through frequently used patterns of language.

In my teaching, the goal is to help students to ground critical thinking in awareness of the rhetorical and linguistic affordances of English languages. Because all students come with different degrees of preparedness, I find building metalinguistic awareness from frequent writing exercises helps students to develop in their own ways. As my numerous teaching awards prove, my approach helps, engages, and empowers student writers.