My curricula and teaching style aim to help students develop rhetorical thinking skills and to apply them to the analysis and production of traditional written work and multimedia texts in order to prepare them for the wide range of genres they will engage with in different aspects of their lives. When designing teaching materials and classroom activities, I guide myself by the three concepts below.
RHETORICAL THINKING ACROSS GENRES
As I begin teaching a new course, I make students aware of the ways in which rhetoric comes into play in their daily interactions, from the words they choose, to the tone of their voice, to their gestures and way of dressing. During our discussion of rhetoric's role in their lives, it becomes clear that it not only affects their academic career but also their professional, civic and personal lives. In order to help students navigate and feel comfortable in different media spaces, I encourage them to apply rhetorical concepts like ethos, logos, pathos and audience awareness to the analysis and production of academic essays, short videos and websites. Since research is incorporated differently into various media texts, I ask students to use both online and print sources for all their projects so they can learn to ethically bring other's ideas to their work in different genres.
MULTIMEDIA PRODUCTION
As Jennifer Edbauer-Rice argues, multimedia production “takes two skills: knowing how to imagine rhetorically and knowing how to use the equipment” (378). In my courses students learn to correlate their ideas for videos and websites with their technical skills and the available tools. In order to help them think as producers, I make students aware of each particular genre's grammar. For film and video, for example, students analyze work through its use of screenplay, cinematography, mise-en-scène, sound and editing in order to unravel how the genre is put together. Understanding the pieces and learning how a particular aesthetic or mood is technically achieved helps students relate to the genre as insiders and demystifies the creation process. In the written rhetorical analysis that accompanies all multimedia projects, students analyze their creative process and use of the particular genre's grammar.
In order to prepare students to work in new genres, I teach them basic technological skills—from lighting and managing the camera to iMovie editing for videos, and from modifying templates to using Photosphop for websites. As students learn these new skills, they weave them with their past technological experience and sense of aesthetics, so that our in-class workshops become a collective exchange of technological and design knowledge, where students share their discoveries and previous knowledge with the class. This atmosphere remains throughout our classroom peer-reviews and critiques in which the class as a whole provides advice to improve different projects.
ETHICAL COLLABORATION
In my classes we dispel the myth that writing is an isolated, lonely activity, asking students to collaborate in the invention and review processes for both individual and group projects. Film and video production helps solidify the need to work with others in the creative process, with small groups of students playing different preproduction, production and postproduction roles as they craft their final products. Although I make working in pairs optional for websites, most of my students choose a partner for their online projects, having enjoyed their previous collaborations.
My emphasis on group work both in and outside the classroom comes from wanting to prepare students for their professional careers, where they will need to ethically collaborate with others. Group work encourages students to confront the needs and desires of others when deciding in what direction a project should go. Especially for groups that are diverse in terms of gender, race, sexuality and social class, discussions of representation invariably emerge, helping group members confront prejudices and assumptions as they try to decide what is ultimately best for the project. Besides preparing students for their professional futures, collaboration helps them confront moral questions about "the other" and learn how to navigate all member's needs and vision when working together.