I am a big believer in merging the theoretical and hands-on approaches in my teaching. Regardless of the course, I always make sure to contextualize course materials so students can understand their readings and our discussion in a broader context. An example of how I contextualize topics can be found in my approach to teaching digital media. I address digital media in most of my courses, especially in the courses I created, and I make sure my students learn more than how to use different types of digital media. I often begin my classes by having students read the introduction to Carolyn Marvin’s When Old Technologies Were New. The book provides historical context for understanding social change and communication media. Rather than approach emerging digital media with a “look how different everything is!” approach, I encourage my students to understand that many of the changes we face now have been faced before. We can learn a great deal about how things will change in the future by learning how they changed in the past.

However, I think it’s sometimes easy to slip into the same old teaching habits, especially when you involve historical approaches. Especially in recent years, I have consciously worked to stop subconsciously reproducing reading lists that rely too heavily on “the cannon,” which is too often a metaphor for dead white European men (nothing’s wrong with dead white European men!). Consequently, I have embraced anti-racist pedagogical practices in my teaching and make sure my syllabi represent minoritized voices, sometimes to the point of literally counting authors to quantify (for myself) representation of marginalized and multiply marginalized scholars. I know that counting sounds silly and reductionist, but I think that without conscious effort, it’s too easy to fall back on what we were taught than it is to reworking our materials and read new things and risk abandoning readings we may be comfortable with. I also think that we need to do more than just include authors from marginalized backgrounds in our courses in the name of some kind of quantified diversity. Instead, we need to build equitable structures where those voices are just as important a part of the class as some of the more supposedly “cannonical” things students read. Doing that work is important not just because it’s the right thing to do; it’s important because it makes the classes much richer and benefits my students in so many ways.

Of course, if we’re going to contextualize emerging media and do so from a diverse perspective, we need to actually do it and not just talk about it on our teaching statements. For a recent example, I  want to briefly mention a  course I’m teaching in fall  2022 (here’s the syllabus…I didn’t choose the official course title). That course does the type of contextualizing I discussed in the first paragraph by pushing back on discourses of “real life” by grounding them in 1990s Internet rhetorics and tracing those rhetorics through the 2020s. I made sure when designing the course to not fall back solely on older readings because I want my  my students to be prepared to enter contemporary conversations, and after an initial false start that mostly represented my doctoral reading lists, I redid the readings to bring more perspectives to the class. I’m proud of the class so far, and while it is a doctoral seminar, I think it would work well (with some tweaks) at the Masters and undergraduate level. More generally…that syllabus encapsulates my approach to teaching, which remains fairly steady whether it’s a doctoral seminar on digital materials cultures, a technical writing course, a media production course, a communication theory course, or a first-year writing course.

Ultimately, if I were to describe my teaching goals as concisely as possible, I’d say my goals (and obviously the philosophy driving those goals) are to

• provide students with the resources to learn for themselves. I do sometimes teach tools in the classroom, but tools change. The most important thing I focus on is building student confidence in their ability to learn on their own.
• not fall back on reproducing syllabi that are not representative or minoritized voices(though obviously there can be some exceptions). Students benefit from reading authors who write from different perspectives, and we have an ethical responsibility to introduce them to that work. I’ve published a journal article on this topic with Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq (all the smart parts are hers), and it’s something I value in my teaching and will continue to work on.
• merge theory and application whenever possible in my courses. If I teach rhetorical theory, I want my students to use it in their writing. If I teach web design, I want them to understand how code works beneath the surface. If I teach a doctoral seminar that is obviously pretty theoretical, I want the assignments to replicate the hidden genres of academic writing students are too rarely exposed to. I hate that we just expect graduate students to be able to know things, so I focus my graduate classes on application as much as I can.
• and most importantly, be kind and welcoming. I want to be the type of professor my students will go to if they have a problem, the kind of professor who may not work on someone’s committee because of different research interests but will still be the person that student goes to for advice. I model kindness and empathy in my teaching, and I’d rather have a student take advantage of that kindness than embrace an adversarial pedagogy.

Final notes

Now that I’ve discussed my teaching approach on a more abstract level, I want to end on some final, more straightforward notes. First off, I have extensive service relating to teaching. I’ve directed a graduate program and created an undergraduate certificate program. I’ve also written state assessment criteria at the programmatic level, and managed staffing and curricular changes. And I’ve also served on college-level and university-level college curricular committees, so yeah…I know how the sausage is made.

Oh, and to move all the way from the abstract to the specific, I’ll end with a list of some of the courses I’ve taught (this isn’t fully comprehensive).

• Digital approaches to literary and cultural studies
• Material Internet Cultures: The Internet IS Real Life
• First-Year Composition
• Qualitative Research Methods
• Non-Profit Grant Writing
• Locative media, mobile communication, and mobile composition
• Introduction to Composition and Rhetoric
• Advanced Composition and Rhetoric
• Introduction to Technical Writing
• Advanced Technical Writing
• Visual Communication & Design
• Digital Narrative Design
• User Experience Design
• Mobile Communication and Spatial Theory
• Directed Readings on Content Development and Social Media Writing
• Principles of Technical Communication
• Content Strategy
• Practicum in Technical Communication
• Digital Media and Communication
• Directed Reading on Mobile Composition and Privacy
• New Media & Communication
• Research Methods
• Technical Editing
• Digital Media Theory