These blog posts demonstrate my evolving thinking about the work of teaching and how to better approach the classroom and the collection of students found therein.
Participation and Feminist Intervention: This post looks at “Participation as Reflective Practice: Digital Composing and Feminist Pedagogy,” written by Jason Palmeri and Abby Dubisar, focusing on viewing participation through a feminist lens, or the idea of dismantling the traditional relationship between teacher and student in favor of a more collaborative environment.
queering participation: Continuing the idea of disrupting traditional constructs of student participation, this post looks at Matthew Cox’s “Queering Student Participation: Whispers, Echoes, Rants, and Memory.” An examination of the “culturally undesirable” classroom, this post asks a simple question: how can disrupting the classroom help us better serve our students?
Persuading the BizCom Student about Persuasion: This post contrasts the arguments for the technical communication classroom, as made by Jessica McCoughey and Brian Fitzpatrick in “Hidden Arguments: Rhetoric and Persuasion in Diverse Forms of Technical Communication,” to the needs of the business communication classroom.
The Pedagogy of Plain Language: The first of two posts centered around Kira Dreher’s “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Communication Classroom,” this post examines how plain language functions in the classroom, both as a teaching tool and as an instructional goal, and thinks about how to present plain language in practical terms to socially conscious undergrads, who are often concerned about issues of social justice.
Radical Femininity in the Classroom: Pushing Back Against Dominant Narratives: Here, I think about what it would take to move from the theory of inclusive pedagogy to the practice of inclusive pedagogy, as discussed by Jessica Edward in “Inclusive Practices in the Technical Communication Classroom.” I conclude that much of my own work within the classroom in this regard centers around the idea of narrative, helping students find their own voice even as they learn specific genres of communication.
Social Justice Advocacy in the Classroom: A topic near and dear to my heart, this post uses Sarah Warren-Riley’s chapter in Citizenship & Advocacy in Technical Communication to think about how teaching students to critically examine the narratives they receive via social media and other venues is an important aspect of social justice advocacy in the classroom, helping students grow and change into adults fully prepared to take on the world beyond the classroom.
Speaking Plainly: The second of two posts revolving around Kira Dreher’s “Engaging Plain Language in the Technical Classroom” (see also “The Pedagogy of Plain Language”), this post examines Dreher’s argument for the explicit linking between plain language and social justice within the classroom. I conclude that it is not only commendable, but indeed necessary, to do so, as a means of benefitting our students and giving them the tools they need to communicate within their specific genres.
The Practical, the Theoretical: In this, my last blog post for the class, I look at the arguments presented by Adrienne Lamberti and David M. Grant in their work, “Regenerating Once Fallow Ground: Theorizing Process and Product in 21st-Century Technical Communication Ecologies.” Marrying their argument — that instructors should ground practical applications on a thorough understanding of theory — to the work of Teaching Fellows, I argue that the work we do in the classroom must be done by someone who understands the rhetorical theories behind the practical applications in order to best serve the students in our care.
Barbara Shaddix 