Whether teaching composition, professional writing, digital media, or film, I always pursue three primary goals: developing rhetorical consciousness, valuing multiple perspectives, and engaging diverse modes of learning.
Developing Rhetorical Consciousness
I seek to prepare students to become rhetorically reflective composers who can enter a new rhetorical situation and analyze it for themselves. Early in every term, I introduce students to key theories of audience, context, and genre; in informal writings and in-class discussions, we practice applying these theories to both the texts we read and the texts we compose. We also collaboratively investigate the conventions (of style, of arrangement, of visual design) that are common in the kinds of texts we will be composing—exploring situations in which the conventions would and would not apply. Once students have completed drafts, we turn to considering how they might revise their work in response to feedback from me, from peer response groups, and (in some cases) from usability tests. In informal writings, conversations, and reflective essays, I ask students to tell me about the rhetorical choices they have made.
Whenever possible, I seek to have students compose works for audiences beyond the immediate classroom. In an upper-level course on Professional Writing and New Media, I assigned student groups to design and conduct usability research for the Ohio State Financial Aid Office. At the beginning of the course, students had a chance to meet with Financial Aid web design team to gain a sense of their concerns, values, and interests. At the end of the course, students composed multiple drafts of a usability report and multimedia presentation, receiving feedback from both me and the client.
I also seek to enable students to make critical rhetorical choices about the technologies they use to compose. In an experimental pilot composition class, I assigned students to analyze a place or create a persuasive campaign using a variety of modalities. They created one primarily alphabetic text, one primarily visual text, and one primarily audio text. In the end, students wrote a word-processed paper in which they reflected upon the unique affordances and constraints of each of the media. In these reflections and in class conversations, students talked about how composing skills could transfer across media—about how successful composing with images, words, and sounds all requires attention to clarity, tone, audience, organization, and unity. Students even started arguing for the power of words when they realized the difficulty of conveying arguments using solely images, music, and environmental sounds.
Valuing Multiple Perspectives
As a teacher and scholar, I value intellectual complexity and generosity. I try to resist binary thinking and embrace multiple perspectives. Even when I disagree with people, I work to understand and appreciate why they think as they do. If I am going to ask students to engage seriously with the perspectives I bring to the classroom (e.g. feminism, rhetoric, disability studies, usability), then I too must be ready to seriously engage with—and indeed actively learn from—the diverse perspectives they bring to the classroom. With this philosophy in mind, I have often assigned students to write analytical dialogues in which they imagine a conversation among people with differing perspectives on an issue. (What if an Aristotelean rhetorician, a cultural studies critic, and a business executive had a conversation about a corporate website? What if a cinematographer, a feminist theorist, and a disability studies theorist had a conversation about a scene from Hitchcock's Vertigo?). By placing numerous perspectives in conversation, students come to appreciate that intellectual questions rarely have simple answers—that analytical thinking requires an openness to multiple point of view.
Engaging Diverse Modes of Learning
Recognizing that students learn in diverse ways, I think it important to provide students with multiple pathways for engaging in invention, revision, and reader response. In addition to participating in class discussions and writing alphabetic papers, students also have the opportunity to learn through writing discussion board entries and blog postings, through composing digital audio files, and (sometimes) through composing images. For example, in a recent composition class, I taught rhetorical analysis by having students remix a series of audio clips from political speeches, asking them to cut, rearrange, and layer the clips to call attention to the speeches' persuasive techniques or to transform the argument of the speeches. Although some students had struggled with closely analyzing the persuasive language of written texts, they found that the act of audio remixing made them more conscious of rhetorical strategies.
I value individual conferences as a way of adapting my teaching to the particular needs and concerns of students. In addition to holding office hours and making in-person appointments, I also regularly consult with students via instant messenger. Although I give detailed, structured assignment prompts, I always encourage students to talk to me if they have ideas for how they might adapt the assignment to better suit their interests and learning needs. In informal writing and oral conversations, I regularly ask students to reflect on what strategies best help them learn and compose. In this way, I hope to prepare students to meet the diverse composing and learning challenges they will encounter throughout their lives.
Jason Palmeri
Assistant Professor of English and Coordinator of Digital Writing
Miami University
Email: jason.palmeri (at) gmail.com
AIM: jasonpalmeri367