18 March 2024
As an early-career instructor, I am most concerned with integrating my personal research interests of digital rhetorics and public scholarship into my pedagogical practices for the introduction to composition and technical communication courses I have thus far been charged with teaching. Naturally, my teaching philosophy statement is heavily influenced by digital technologies as I find these tools and spaces to be massively productive for orienting students to approaching their composition practices, both in everyday exercises like email or text message writing or in more unusual exercises like report writing or website design.
Of course, my teaching philosophy is designed to evolve over time because of my growth as an instructor and the evolution of the digital technologies that are foundational to my pedagogy. However, because of the usefulness of digital technology in my experiences as a student and as an instructor, my teaching philosophy will always be a teaching with technology philosophy as, to me, the two are inextricably linked. To me, teaching is about supporting students in the development of as many resources as possible in order to prepare them for the complex needs of their life, and rhetoric and composition skills in conjunction with digital technologies is a fantastic way to strengthen many personal and professional skills at once.
Effective learning and teaching with technology for composition is driven by the need for what Selber (2004) defines as multiliteracies: functional literacy, critical literacy, and rhetorical literacy. A mastery of these multiliteracies in conjunction with one another equips both students and teachers with the ability to write, both in a narrow text-on-a-page sense and in a broader message-via-a-medium sense. It is critically important to teach composition skills to equip students to write in a variety of genres and mediums and to critically assess other writing for validity and quality. Technology is intricately linked with being able to create compositions and to analyze others’ compositions as more and more writing and information is being delivered via a screen. Writing is a critical skill to exercise both in the academy and in the broader world; a student’s ability to compose a successful tweet, email, essay, video, report, text message, infographic, or anything else relies on their ability to assess the available means of persuasion for their specific context and audience. Therefore, by merit of a helpful rhetorical literacy framework, any composition class should equip students to be prepared to write for their classes, for their career, and for their life as a whole.
I have never existed in a society without digital technology; further, my own most engaging and transformative teachers have deeply integrated the digital into their pedagogy. In the pursuit of being as engaging and transformative as these teachers have been for a student body that has been exposed to digital technology for most if not all of their lives, teaching with technology is an absolute necessity. Throughout my education, I have designed multiple websites (including this one) as a way to demonstrate what I have learned about digital, visual, and written rhetorics in conjunction with one another. I have made social media accounts on TikTok, Twitter, and Instagram; infographics; podcasts; and videos. These multimodal projects served to develop my own multiliteracies as they allowed me the opportunity to practice composition for many audiences, many purposes, and many mediums.
These exercises in multimodal composition have made me exceptionally aware of how rhetorical skills can strengthen all forms of communication. For instance, being taught how to create accessible client reports on Adobe InDesign by one such innovative professor and how to create public scholarship for Instagram by another was illuminating for the trajectory of how I think about the digital ever since. Digital tools like the Adobe Suite allows for compositions to be designed for audiences of many abilities. Digital files like the PDFs and PNGs that the Adobe Suite creates allows for the easy circulation of a message through a variety of means like social media, email, and learning management systems like Canvas. Digital media like images, gifs, and videos allows for information to be represented in multiple interesting ways on those pdfs, with or without textual explanation. Students can be taught to tap into these possibilities by rhetoric and composition professors who care to introduce that these possibilities exist and to begin the instruction of how students can utilize the available resources for students’ own means. Further, because of how enlightening and engaging these exercises were for my own education, and thus my conception of my work and life, I have a personal stake in making these sorts of experiences available to my students through my pedagogy as well.
In addition to the many forms that composition can take, digital technology has created spaces by which many students’ (and non-students’) workflows operate. Rhetoric and composition instructors are uniquely situated to radically transform these workflows as explained by the concept of multiliteracies, as my own rhetoric and composition instructors have done for me. These classes can not only teach hard skills like how to use software like the Adobe Suite or WordPress, but these classes can help interrogate how those technologies are created and for whom and what purpose.
Digital tools are not neutral or above considerations of ethics, and that has never been more evident than our current moment with the increasingly complicated response to generative AI like ChatGPT and changes in social media like the evolution of Twitter to X. However, just because these technologies are enmeshed in complicated discussions of ethics, that does not mean that they cannot be extremely productive objects of study and practical tools for the classroom. For instance, generative AI like ChatGPT is likely here to stay, and thus it is important to equip students with ways to use the technology ethically and productively, especially because they will likely be tasked with using it in their careers and the technology will likely become integrated (both visibly and invisibly) in other technologies that they will use in their everyday lives. This nexus of critical literacy, rhetorical literacy, and functional literacy is a crucial element to any composition classroom, and I believe that making Selber’s conception of multiliteracies a foundational guiding principle in any writing classroom will foster the sort of responsible composition practices that are so important in this digital age.
Integrating technology into my pedagogy at every opportunity can reinforce the idea of the possibilities of these digital resources to my students, no matter the level in which they must interface with these technologies. Ultimately, the pursuit of equipping students with as many resources as possible for their futures is at the core of my technology-centered teaching philosophy.
Ash Mayes 