Learning happens when we are exposed to new texts, objects, and methods and when we are encouraged to experiment and take risks. I design courses with this definition of learning in mind.

Encouraging students to take risks in the classroom requires an infrastructure that allows for such risk. In many of my undergraduate classes, I use a system of evaluation called the Learning Record (LR). This system asks students to make an argument for their grade (at midterm and at the end of the course) that is based upon the evidence they have compiled throughout the semester. Students record observations of their learning process, and they analyze their learning process in terms of the goals of the course. They evaluate that work based on specific grade criteria established at the beginning of the course. Students provide a grade estimate, and then I offer a response that either concurs or makes a counter argument for why the grade is higher or lower. Throughout the course of the semester, I provide extensive feedback on writing. However, I do not provide letter grades on individual assignments.

The LR encourages risk and experimentation because students have an opportunity to reflect on failure. Obviously, continued failure will not result in a high grade, but students are offered the opportunity to treat an unsuccessful assignment as an opportunity to rethink their reading and writing processes. This same ethic of risk and experimentation carries over to how I approach writing with new media technologies in the classroom. I do not ask students to become expert graphic designers or filmmakers. While I have taught courses in which students design web pages, use Adobe InDesign, and create audio and video compositions, I see these assignments as an opportunity to experiment with such technologies. Students are not evaluated on their technical skill. Rather, my evaluation is based on whether they’ve made thoughtful use of the medium and whether they have considered how that medium fits with the rhetorical situation. Students are free to tinker with these technologies and to explore their possibilities.

My aim is to encourage this ethic of tinkering when it comes to technology and when it comes to rhetorical analysis. My hope is that students will explore and inquire and that they will develop strategies for interpreting and producing texts. In a course entitled “Anthologics,” I ask students to analyze and then join an existing scholarly conversation by editing their own anthology. The “anthological” method that I’ve developed during different iterations of this course offers students a way to map the existing rhetorical terrain, and it also allows me a flexible approach that I can revise each semester. For instance, one version of this course asks students to compile an anthology based on a research question. Students research various positions on a topic, analyze these positions using the tools of rhetorical analysis, and write a preface to their anthology that serves to map out the various arguments they have chosen to include in their collection. In Fall 2009, the topic was “Detroit Anthologics,” and students examined research about Detroit (this research spanned various fields, from history to urban studies to public health). In addition, students in this course choose a publisher and write a book proposal, design a book jacket using Adobe InDesign, and make decisions about how to organize the text. Students are asked to sit with a number of texts that either overlap or clash with one another. The anthological method is often foreign to them, for it is the exact opposite of what is modeled on cable news, in many blogs, or in email conversations. But my hope is that they learn the advantages of listening before arguing and of understanding what is at stake in an argument before dismissing it.

While technology is put to use in this course on “Anthologics,” it is not always the primary focus of this course. In Winter 2011, I taught a senior seminar entitled “New Media and The Futures of Writing” that did take writing technologies as its focus. This class defines writing very broadly. Students write with video, and they write code. As they learn the basics of these new media technologies, they are encouraged to think about how such technologies affect our theories of writing, rhetoric, and literature. They tinker with various technologies to remix texts (literary and otherwise), to learn about how new media tools enable and constrain different types of writing, and to explore how tools that seem to be outside the realm of English studies might be applied to our disciplinary practices. The main task of this class is to stretch the limits of English studies. Students help invent the future of writing.

Many of the pedagogical practices described above apply to my graduate courses as well. However, my main goal in teaching graduate courses is to continually rethink both the process and products of the graduate seminar. In “New Media Interfaces and Infrastructures,” we treated an emerging writing space, Google Wave, as our central object of study. We both used and analyzed Google Wave, and we collaboratively composed an essay describing our approach to the seminar. That essay will appear in Pedagogy in 2012, and it argues that new media objects can serve much the same pedagogical purpose that other texts serve. By encouraging students to explore the possibilities of new media technologies and to study those technologies with the help of theories of new media, the English Studies classroom can become a laboratory in which we bring the analytical tools of the humanities to bear on emerging technologies.

My other attempt to rethink the graduate seminar involves a pedagogical approach I describe as “drilling down.” Students read a contemporary debate in rhetorical studies, and then they explore the texts that serve as the foundations of that debate. For instance, in “The Questions of Critique,” we study contemporary debates about ideology critique, hermeneutics and post-hermeneutics, and invention. In the unit on hermeneutics, we begin by reading a debate between Steve Mailloux and Diane Davis regarding interpretation and the appropriation of the other. We then “drill down” to the works that influence these two authors. In this case, the “drill down” texts consisted of work by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Emmanuel Levinas, Richard Rorty, and Werner Hamacher. Rather than starting from “the beginning” of any conversation, this approach communicates to students that we’re always jumping into the middle of things, and it provides them with some strategies for mapping the terrain of contemporary debates in rhetorical studies.