For all students, my goal as an instructor is to foster students’ awareness of and agency in discourse. Whether I am teaching first year composition, fundamentals of rhetoric, writing with style, or technical writing, I welcome students to make choices about which readings we will focus on and what projects they will complete to show comprehension. For example, in my technical writing course I give students a selection of textbook chapters, professional blog posts, research articles, and LinkedIn Learning videos, and ask students to reflect on their own learning and process goals as the decide which selection to study. Coming into class, students then start class writing and collaboratively putting together this jigsaw of resources to construct their own theories of how technical writing, research, and proposal writing work. I believe that involving students in curricular design increases motivation and teaches self-directed learning. I also encourage metalinguistic awareness through frequent genre analysis, presenting students with example compositions that both follow and flout expectations. And I prompt students to translate what they are learning into their own words, inviting them to reflect on what they have learned and how they might put that knowledge into practice and transfer that knowledge to other situations.
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