“Reality is not an object but a process of relationships . . . knowledge itself is held in the relationships and connections formed with the environment that surrounds us.” —Shawn Wilson, Research is Ceremony

My view of education in general is similar to that proposed by Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed; that is, through education “people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation” (83). Education should be active and reflective. This means we learn through practice and by reflecting on that practice. What I hope to make possible over the span of each semester, whether the focus of a particular course is basic writing, first-year writing, creative non-fiction, or writing center theory is that students leave the classroom with rhetorical and critical skills–the tools by which they can interrogate their own knowledge, understand where that knowledge came from and what institutions it upholds, and articulate their own experiences in an engaged relationship with the experiences they have in my classroom. Ideally, every day of teaching is an act of questioning complacency, generating excitement about learning, and coming to terms with the challenges presented by the course, whether it be reading a composition theory text, writing a fragmented essay, interviewing a professor, or giving a presentation.

One of the most effective ways of enacting these goals is through a rhetorical approach to texts, objects, and practices. By this, I mean I ask students to question, analyze, and confront the assumptions and values imbedded in their everyday environment—in scholarly readings, in ordinary objects, in college writing assignments. In daily teaching situations, students are asked questions like these about their own writing, readings for class, model projects, and writing technologies:
How does this kind of text/object/practice work? How is it made? Why might I be asked to write a text like this? What purpose does it serve? Who values texts/objects/practices like these? Why? What values are evident in texts/objects/practices like these? What values does this text/object/practice exhibit? How? How does the audience/user/actor see the world? How can I reach my intended audience?

These questions serve as a rubric through which we can begin to engage with texts, objects, and practices on a multitude of levels. Using this frame, students consider where writing comes from and how it is produced. For example, early in the semester I often teach an assignment that asks students to research their own life. Each student first maps important events, people, places, activities, objects, and social and cultural events from his/her life onto a “lifeline” and looks for intersections between particular people, places, objects, and events, ultimately choosing a memory to revisit, a story to (re)tell. For the essay, each student develops a descriptive narrative of the selected memory, interviews at least two people who figure prominently in the memory, describes and analyzes at least one artifact that played a significant role in the memory, and summarizes and analyzes a public event that was happening at the same time as the memory, one that can be researched in newspapers or magazines. Through this work students begin to see their memories in new ways, uncovering values and assumptions in their actions and understandings, while building skills that support assignments of increasing complexity throughout the course. The recursive nature of the writing process brings students back to our rhetorical rubric frequently and highlights the dynamic relationship between the writer, their text, and the world.

This rhetorical approach is just as useful for me when teaching graduate students in a writing group or at a writing center as it is when teaching undergraduate students in a classroom. It allows us to examine the situated-ness of our scholarly practices and to move from the specific to the general, from the local to the global, intertwining students’ own experiences with those valued by the academy and those valued by the world outside academia. As a graduate writing group facilitator and writing consultant, I have developed semester- and year-long mentoring and consulting relationships with graduate students writing dissertations, job letters, and CVs. Helping students become aware of these professional documents as representations of themselves is enormously useful in their revision processes and in producing final, useable versions of these materials. In every teaching and mentoring situation, I work with students to explore connections between how meaning is made and valued through practice in everyday and institutional settings.