My teaching is in constant conversation with my scholarship, which keeps me active and innovative in the classroom. For instance, shortcomings I had experienced in the classroom helped me develop my dissertation project: I wanted students to be more adept visual communicators, particularly in digital projects, but I lacked a visual rhetoric geared for digital production. I believe that my students' projects have since benefited from improved, theoretically grounded course materials and activities that I've developed on image treatment, typography, color, and other visual concerns-all of which were informed by (and in turn, inform) the dissertation and other projects. Being able to apply concepts and concerns from my research and share in the experience of working through and refining them with students is both rewarding and energizing.
I have consistently designed courses and projects grounded in problems and concerns addressed by practicing professionals in writing, design, and other fields. Students in my technical writing class, for example, worked with the recommendation documents published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); these important documents, which are the discursive backbone of the Web's various languages and technologies, are fine examples of user-hostile documentation. However, because Web writers and designers would benefit from the documents' contents, my students reworked and the recommendation documents on various Web languages, like HTML, for the writer/designer audience. Additionally, students redesigned several university Web page templates according to their revised documents (which were shared across the class, allowing for further testing of the revised documents' clarity and readability), and then wrote instructions to help non-tech specialists across the university who might have to use the templates. Students had to conduct research to determine who those "non-tech specialists" actually might be. Such real-world projects are challenging to teach at times, because they are not as "clean" as projects developed according to a particular pedagogical goal; however, students' experiences are enriched by first-hand encounters with the messiness of actual rhetorical contexts.
When possible, I try to design course projects that students will be able to use and maintain long after the course has ended. The first project in my multimedia writing course has been a professional portfolio Web site, geared for an audience in the students' area of study and post-college career ambitions: potential employers, non-profit organizations, or graduate schools. I have been pleased to learn from students who write seeking letters of recommendation that they are still using and updating their portfolio site first developed in Multimedia Writing (sometimes years after taking the course). One of the early activities of the portfolio project is for students to search the Web and locate and evaluate what they believe to be solid examples of portfolios from professionals in their specialization; students submit these links to me, and I post them on the course Web site. This fall, one student's favorite portfolio site was by Eric Salczynski (http://www.ericsal.com), a graphic designer and former student who'd begun his portfolio in my class.
To make the portfolio and other projects in my classes have longer-term use value, I also allow generous room for students to adjust projects to suit their needs and interests; I work directly with each student to be sure she also meets stated course goals. By helping individual students tailor an assignments to their interests, I find they become highly motivated and more likely to follow through with their original project plans. In very technical classes, like Multimedia Writing, this customization also allows students of varying technological abilities to be challenged and yet feel they are making progress.
In every course I teach, I stress the importance of situating writing and digital production in historical and theoretical concerns in appropriate fields like rhetoric, technology, and the design arts. Rather than focusing on the traditional split between theory and practice, or theorists and practitioners, students in my class work towards applied theory: through this, they take the first steps towards becoming theoreticians and savvier writers and digital producers. In the Multimedia Writing class, students read from Tim Berners-Lee's history of the Web and pay particular attention to Berners-Lee's vision for universal information access on the Web, regardless of a user's equipment or ability. As a critical exercise, students then compare that vision and likeminded statements in the documents of the World Wide Web Consortium with the actual Web we encounter, where sites demand visitors to use a particular browser, e.g., "This site requires Internet Explorer 5.0 and above." Moving to the application of theory, students then work to build W3C-standards-compliant Web productions that are accessible and functional, to some degree, in any browser on any computer. This is a great deal of challenging work, but it gives students the background and experience to engage more critically with both the history of the Web, and the theory driving its different languages and technology. Extending beyond that, students also develop critical lenses for reading more advanced theoretical texts on new media, hypertext theory, and digital literacy; this in turn informs their production work on class projects.
I treat the classroom as a studio, a place for learning through collaborative hands-on work; I routinely write with students on projects I assign, so that collaboration extends not only between students, but between the students and me, too. Through this, we work to more clearly define problems that must be solved for a given project. Collaboration with students improves my teaching by helping me tailor lessons and course materials, but it also allows everyone in the class to benefit from different specialties of diverse students, what I call a class's "knowledge economy": the special talents, background, and approaches students bring to the class. For example, for my own digital production work, I use a number of different graphics packages instead of Adobe Photoshop; however, Photoshop is the graphics package most of my students wish to learn. So even while I am working to improve my abilities to guide students in using Photoshop, I am unafraid to invite students with extensive backgrounds in the software to lead the class through solving a particular problem. This helps students see that I (and their classmates) value their unique contributions. But it also, somewhat paradoxically, builds my teaching ethos by openly revealing the limitations of my knowledge. When students learn that I will admit when I don't know something, I gain their trust for times when I do make a particular argument/claim that I do know something.
I'm always interested in building a strong rapport with each of my students. For technology-heavy courses, this is essential: when students come to know that I am approachable, understanding, and supportive of their efforts, they are far less likely to feel lost or overwhelmed by the technology. As I stated above, when students see me working with them through course projects, they learn not only that the project is something I value enough to do myself, but also that, as one student said to me just recently, "it's obvious" that I really enjoy teaching. The rapport I have with students often extends and continues to grow well beyond the semester they are in class with me. Years after taking my course, students have written me asking for advice on their resumes, portfolios, and other projects. Sometimes students write simply to share good news, like my former student Greg, a computer graphics technology major, who wrote, "I accepted a position as web developer for a polygraph company in January, so I've been very busy with that. I plan to accept the full time position that they offered me this last week.... I think that my CSS testing and stuff in your 419 [Multimedia Writing] class got me a long way into my job. Thanks for pushing us out of table-land, that has done wonders for my ability to design coherent sites."
My teaching plans mirror my active research agenda. I'm interested in improving my teaching techniques in computer classrooms by developing materials and approaches that free students from becoming dependent on a particular piece of software; such materials would also help students from colleges and universities without large technology budgets to still make significant contributions in the digital medium. I've also begun to work on a possible course on what's called "single-sourcing" for writers working both in print and the digital mediums, so that their text is composed, revised, and updated from one place (often an XML document)-and is instantaneously available for print, Web, and other digital environments that have yet to be developed. I'm also working at ways to teach digital ethics through accessibility and sustainability to ensure access for all, and access to materials well into the future.
For my teaching efforts, I have received both the Purdue University Department of English Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award (2004), and the university-wide Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award (2005).