My Teaching Philosophy

I just completed my first semester of teaching Composition I at the University of

Arkansas at Little Rock. During this semester, I have attempted to put into practice the
scholarship on composition theory I had been reading and studying as a graduate
student in the Professional and Technical Writing Program. Having taught for about
four months now, I have gained tremendous insight and practical experience with the
theories of compositional pedagogy which I previously only grasped in the abstract. The
combination of my experience teaching Composition I this semester, simultaneously
taking a Practicum course which offers additional theoretical and practical support for
first-time teachers of composition, and my plans to teach Composition II the following
semester have lead me to refine and develop my idea about the three core qualities I
wish to augment in my students through my teaching. In any freshman writing class,
my goals are to make students more rhetorically engaged with the classroom and
academia in general, more rhetorically dexterous with different voices and contexts
of writing, and more rhetorically aware of the pervasiveness of rhetoric in the world
around them.
As a composition instructor, I consider it one of my highest goals and greatest
challenges to keep students rhetorically engaged with my class. In Composition I
this semester, I have experimented with a number of different teaching techniques and
classroom activities, trying to discern what methods are more effective at getting
students to participate in class and think critically about class materials and discussions.
I have found the most success in small group discussions and teacher-led classroom
discussions. With the former, I have learned that students are more engaged with a
discussion when they are given specific questions and terms to contend with in their
small groups; otherwise, a broader prompt might elicit minimal or muted response.
With the latter, I have learned how to ask tougher questions which force the students to
consider seriously their opinion about a matter. I try to avoid giving the students my
own answers, instead prompting them by returning their questions with questions of my
own, encouraging students to engage each other in discussion, and trying to make the
students see the material as pertinent and organic to their own lives. I have also learned
to pick topic matters which students will find to be interesting and fun to discuss. For
example, when I was introducing the notion of rhetorical situations to my students, I
used movies as a discussion starter. At first the students quickly identified different
basic genres within movies, but soon I problematized their categorizations by
introducing movies which seemed to blur the lines between different genres. As a class,
we discussed how certain genres of movies, like different rhetorical situations, help set
audience expectations and influence how subsequent information will be perceived. I
hope that by getting students to become rhetorically engaged with the class material, I
can get them rhetorically engaged with society and public discourse by extension. I
intend to use more active classroom discussion and more societal topics like gun
control in my Composition II class.

As a composition instructor, I always strive to teach my students to be rhetorically

dexterous as they must approach multiple different assignments, different perceived
audiences, and different writing contexts throughout the course. In Composition I this
semester, I assigned my students four major writing projectsa personal narrative, a
scholarship essay, an editorial writing assignment, and a rhetorical analysisin order to
present my students with a variety of different contexts in which to write. I always
encourage my students to imagine the audience who will be reading their written work,
and try to get them to see their writing as a practical tool for communicating with and
changing the world. In a similar fashion, I push my students to try writing from
different viewpoints as a means of exploring their ideas about a given issue and as a
means of exploring the versatility of rhetoric. For example, one of my most successful
classes this semester was a class where we discussed gun control. I presented them with
a list of neutral facts and statistics about gun laws and gun violence in the United States.
I asked the students to work in groups, first constructing a narrative in favor of stricter
gun laws, and then asking them to construct a narrative in favor of looser gun laws.
During both phases, I questioned my students about how to contend with facts or
statistics which seemed to defy their narrative. I hope that by pushing my students to
become more rhetorically dexterous, they will learn to be more flexible in how they
approach their future writingsinside and outside the classroom. I intend to give my
students more, smaller writing assignments where they can explore even more
different writing voices and contexts in my Composition II class.
Lastly, as a composition instructor, my greatest and most fundamental goal is for my
students to become more rhetorically aware of everything around them. When my
Composition I class began this semester, my students had almost no idea what the term
rhetoric meant. The few students who had learned the term rhetoric before
understood it simply to be persuasion, but they understood the term as being strictly an
academic concept. But as the semester progressed, I used class activities where students
had to analyze a text, a visual, a video, or a speech to discern how this might be
considered rhetorical. I told my students to think about rhetoric as the choices a person
makes to become more persuasive. In their first three major writing projectthe
personal narrative, the scholarship essay, and the editorial writing assignmentmy
students had to make choices which would render their writing more persuasive. In
their fourth major writing project, my students had to interpret the rhetorical decisions
made by others. Throughout the semester, I relentlessly ask my students: Why does the
author use this particular tone in this passage? Why does the artist use these particular
colors in this visual? How do we make these same kinds of decisions in our own daily
lives? I hope that by making my students more aware of the rhetorical decisions of these
texts and visuals, I make them more inclined to and capable of seeing rhetoric used in
public spaces todayand by extension, the rhetoric they themselves use. I intend to use
a similar approach of constantly asking my students to ponder the rhetorical decisions
we make in my Composition II class.
I know that I still have a lot to learn. My experience teaching Composition I, getting
support from the Practicum course, and planning Composition II has not prepared me
for every eventuality. This semester, I have been surprised a few times by unexpected
classroom dilemmas. At one point, I caught a student flagrantly plagiarizing on his
major writing projects and had to fail the student in the end. At another point toward

the end of the semester, I received frantic emails from a student who had just figured
out that she was not on track to pass the course, asking me for anything/everything I
could possibly do to help her. Whatever surprises I come across in Composition II, I
know where I can get feedback and support to overcome these challenges. I am not the
best composition instructor, but I have sufficient knowledge and experience with
teaching to know that I can proceed in Composition II equipped to help my students
become more rhetorically engaged, more rhetorically dexterous, and more
rhetorically aware as they continue with their college education and enter society as
college-educated adults.