Lydia McDermott Teaching Philosophy 1

Statement of Teaching Philosophy All of the courses I teach are informed by an awareness of the intersection of rhetorical education and feminist pedagogy. For me the hallmarks of this intersection are: responsiveness to rhetorical situation and need, acknowledgement of the collaborative and embodied nature of learning and teaching, and care for the individual well-being of my students. Not only do I strive for this intersection in my teaching, I am also daily confronted with it in my various roles within my institution. I currently teach non-native English speakers introductory Business Communication and seniors in womens and gender studies how to perform and write feminist research. As the Assistant Coordinator of the newly formed Graduate Writing and Research Center, I teach graduate students across disciplines skills like how to structure literature reviews, while also training advanced graduate students to tutor these same students in their particular research methodologies. Sometimes, I honestly forget which costume I am wearing, quite literally, since the College of Business standard of dress is business formal, while the Womens and Gender Studies program is much more casual. To balance these different roles, I need to keep my rhetorical ears and eyes open. Awareness of context and of rhetorical situation is a fundamental skill I practice in my professional life and that I encourage my students to practice in all of their composing tasks. The consistent undercurrent in my teaching is responsiveness. I fiercely believe in listening to my students concerns, taking them seriously, and being open to learning from them. Concurrently, I understand that I may have access to knowledge that helps me to understand some needs my students may not yet recognize they have. So, while I am continually responsive to my students, I also challenge them to consider possibilities they had not encountered before. I draw from critical feminist pedagogy in that, like bell hooks, I emphasize love as a core value of teaching, but I do not limit love to acquiescence. Love is often challenging and uncomfortable. I encourage students to be critically aware of the power structures they are working within, and to use rhetoric to their advantages within these systems. My other large influence in teaching is the history of rhetorical education itself. Like Debra Hawhee, I see rhetorical education as bodily and relational. In every course, I take the opportunity to get my students up and moving and interacting with the wider world. The best example of this has been in my junior-level composition courses, and womens and gender studies senior-capstone that have focused on ethnographic research. For an entire term, my students interact with a subculture, taking field notes, collecting artifacts, and conducting oral histories. Even in classes that are less research intensive, we practice interviewing within the classroom, and observational exercises outside the classroom. My current WGS 2000 students have gone on an accessibility scavenger hunt in teams across campus in order to examine how accessible the campus is for various populations. Additionally, in all of my classes I stress the collaborative nature of composing knowledge through a significant amount of group work, a term that makes many of my students groan. I work closely with groups in my classes to make sure they are functioning in healthy ways, but I insist on their remaining in groups. Inevitably, just as in the world of work or creative activity, they produce products they never could have done alone. My students have created websites, wikis, group collages, interactive lessons, and a host of other multi-modal compositions through group work that is rhetorically in tune. Just as I must listen carefully in class and respond to students needs, in groups they must learn to do this with each other, and adapt when necessary. Together we practice principles of both rhetorical education and feminist pedagogy to create new knowledge collectively.