Teaching Statement
I enjoy teaching media studies and composition classes. My courses seek to establish a mode of critical inquiry into texts and writing through the analysis of existing texts and through the experimental development of new texts. My teaching focuses on joining the abstract and the specific in a dialectic that encourages critical inquiry into both. I believe that students need to study individual texts on a specific, concrete level as well as on the larger level of the structure in which those texts operate, be it genre, media type, or language.
In teaching the abstract and the local, I have found the intricacies of technology to be particularly useful. For instance, I often frame teaching video games within the Oulipean tradition of working within boundaries to draw parallels between the boundaries imposed by poetic language and the constrained nature of computer code. Similarly, I often connect the appearance of mathematical absolutes in computer code to the perception of absolutes, and the inaccuracy of this, in other systems like the changing systems used in grammar. By connecting often abstract questions like systemization and the nature of open, changing sytems like technology and writing to other instances helps to remove student preconceptions about technology and its relationship to gender, culture, literature, and writing.
My classes blend traditional pedagogy with experimental practice by focusing on collaborative writing practice and participatory classroom activities in addition to traditional student-teacher interaction. Projects for my courses mix traditional approaches of analysis and writing with more experimental approaches. Usually, course projects guide my students from specific works to the larger systems in which those works operate. Such an approach reinforces the importance of form in all kinds of writing, as well as the intertextual nature of writing and media. Furthermore, it suggests that experimental forms of writing might illuminate new avenues of knowledge for other fields.
My classroom pedagogy involves a variety of student-centered activities that supplement traditional lectures. Daily class activities often include group exercises, in which students meet with their bands to answer questions, brainstorm topics, or conduct experiments. These activities involve students directly in concept-formation and thus illustrate key ideas by practice, rather than by lecture. Students also provide peer-review resources for one another. The variety of collaborative work done in my courses helps generate a classroom community that gives students active ownership of the knowledge they are learning. This ownership is essential as the course moves from traditional approaches toward more experimental ones.
In the collaborative writing assignments, I promote student projects that expand outside the typical bounds of the classroom. Whether this is in technical writing in service to the university by having students write help pages or for the creation of texts that other classes can use in their research, I aim to have students create evolving works that will be read and used by persons outside of the class. I have found that this sort of work encourages students to see the value in their writing and work as other than arbitrary assignments for school, and it encourages them to see their writing as a process involving continued dialogue.
I hope to teach video game and comics studies—both history and theory—and new media studies and production. I envision courses that use both traditional and experimental approaches to textual production. Ideally, these courses would fulfill the needs of the department while drawing on my own interests and research.
This is still being refined. I have a lot of thoughts about teaching and truncating them into a page or so is proving more difficult than I expected.