Teaching

In my teaching, I help students develop their own identity as stakeholders in the knowledge-building enterprise of the university. Whether they are newcomers to the academic community or burgeoning participants in the activities of their chosen fields, I encourage my students to think deeply about their goals and values so that they can more fully claim ownership over their futures. To this end, I focus my teaching on the responsibilities inherent in knowledge-building—that is, creating, circulating, and acting upon our shared forms of understanding. I help students achieve this by facilitating: 1) reflection on research processes and disciplinary norms; 2) critical navigation of technologically-mediated information; and 3) engagement with the relation between the university and its community.

Engaging Knowledge-Building in Disciplinary Research

Especially at a STEM-oriented institution such as Purdue, first-year writing is a vital space for students to learn about and reflect on the research and writing practices of their disciplines. I introduce students to a rhetorical, audience-driven perspective on academic discourse, and I ask them to analyze the research in their own fields for the rhetorical norms that shape this knowledge. The success of this approach, I believe, can be measured by my students’ increased ability to describe and make their own use of the simultaneously factual and argumentative forms of writing inherent to knowledge-building in collective endeavors such as academic disciplines.

Engaging Knowledge-Building in the Digital Commons

My own experience as a student writer coincided with the rise of the internet as a venue for research and information, and my experience as a teacher has coincided with the rise of phenomena such as fake news, ubiquitous mobile media, and the supplanting of traditional news services with the endless scroll of social networking platforms. So I have always felt oriented toward the role that digital technology has played in the circulation of information. As an instructor at the University of Louisville, I designed and taught a first-year writing course themed on the topic of Wikipedia and other digital spaces of collectivized knowledge work. More recently, as a Technology Mentor and Online Course Coordinator for the first-year writing program at Purdue, I have worked with instructors to design assignments and activities that engage students with the processes of conducting scholarly research online and distinguishing reliable and unreliable sources. This orientation toward the politics and pragmatics of the digital commons has thus shaped my sense of what it means to contribute to the work of knowledge-building, as a student or a teacher, inside or outside the university.

Engaging Knowledge-Building in Community Care

Since these disciplinary practices and information technologies help form relations between the academy and the broader public, I also ask students to engage with the communities that share in the stakes of this activity. For example, in a community-engagement-oriented course, my students and I partnered with Purdue’s Center for Advocacy, Response, and Education (CARE), the campus organization that serves as a resource center and confidential reporting service for students encountering sexual or relationship violence. We first read and analyzed arguments covering this issue in the public sphere; then we learned about CARE’s strategies for responding to this problem on Purdue’s campus, and my students created research projects on the impact of CARE’s work on the student community. These projects included surveys of the first-year student population, a rhetorical analysis of CARE’s internet and social media presence, and usability testing of CARE’s intake materials. Through this sort of engagement with public debate and community response, I help students learn to follow the movement of knowledge-building practices across the public, their communities, and our institutions.