TEACHING & PEDAGOGY

TEACHING EFFECTIVENESS:

WORK-BASED THEORY, FOCUS, & INSTRUCTIONAL SUPPORT

My goal as a teacher is to contribute to the function and improvement of organizations by facilitating student use of communication methodologies to asses and respond to professional writing and visual design situations. To achieve this goal, my courses are designed around Work Based learning strategies. Through a grant opportunity with the Mellon Foundation and Old Dominion University, I have developed Work Based learning course content that provides students with high-impact learning opportunities that align with core industrial competencies including leadership, communication, critical analysis, technology, and others. Below are discussions and examples of pedagogy and instructional support to this end.

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Comparative rhetorical theory for Civil Engineering curriculum

The classroom presentation "How and Why to Tell Community Stories" illustrates my use of a critical rhetorical lens for comparative teaching in the graduate civil engineering course "Developing Reflective Engineers with Artful Methods (CE 5331)".  For this course, I reach to the rhetorical lens of new-materialism to provide a framework for discussions about specific interactions of economy within fields of environment and culture. By adapting this lens for use in this course, I am able to present students with a comparative narrative tool for articulating environmental and cultural implications of engineering work. I co-developed foundational curriculum for this NSF-funded course and co-taught three semesters of the module "Engineering, the Environment and the Community," one of three core course modules that include "Engineering Meets Art" and "VisualThinking in Engineering". Please click the icon "Machine Assisted" to see a paper about this course published in a proceeding of ASEE.

Embracing writing and research for learning 

Although specific applications of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Discipline (WID) may be determined by a teacher's alignment with departmental and institutional curriculum and pedagogies, in the courses that I teach, I embrace a commonality of WAC/ WID in my adherence to  theory that forwards 

writing and research as an effective mode of learning. In my Technical Writing classroom, I incorporate writing and research in order to provide students with self-determined opportunities to learn about disciplinary communication theories and methods that they are asked to use in assignments, as well as with opportunities to reinforce and to amplify classroom teaching. In my First-Year Writing classroom, I apply a concentrated approach to writing as a mode of learning in my core curriculum structure, asking students from the first week of class to write about their career dreams and goals. This first assignment kicks off a series of writing and research

assignments intended to provide students with an opportunity to crystallize or to explore their educational goals and to develop a clearer idea about the roles that they would like to adopt in a profession. In addition, I support this disciplinary writing and research within a course framework that presents writing itself as a discipline of study, in order to convey that the writing students perform for specific courses or within specific professional contexts carry distinct purposes that demand analytical knowledge about those situations and some research about that writing as a discipline or genre.

Visual design theory and practice in accessible learning spaces for peer communication modeling

My theoretical and practical training in visual communication design facilitates critique of documents that students develop through coursework. Along with feedback to the specific learning threshold of any assignment, each graded document also receives written feedback on visual design principles. In addition to the visual design criteria that are included in rubric frameworks for each assignment, I also provide students with diverse learning spaces for visual design practice and literacy. These spaces 

include group and classwork presentations of rough draft work and also cloud spaces where students post practice documents that are accessible within University guidelines for privacy and accessibility. These learning spaces facilitate problem-solving of course goals through peer modeling while also providing students with opportunities to develop literacy when they give peer feedback that uses visual design terminologies. This scaffolding of visual design practice, literacy, and analysis is presented within a rhetorical framework that considers the importance of visual design in developing organizational and personal identity and ethos, in addition to the practical use of visual design in improving communication effectiveness.

Clear assessment methods with low-stakes iterative 

learning in a supportive classroom

I strive to provide students with clear assignments and grading rubrics in order to facilitate their understanding of coursework expectations. Providing simple descriptions and previews of what constitutes quality work is part of my broader teaching effort to apply learning theory that contends students learn more when they are  comfortable in a classroom and when they are provided with adequate instructional support. This instructional support extends to my classroom planning. Not being a fan of letting students leave class "early," I plan my classes with activities and presentations that are intended to make the learning experience fun and engaging, yet intense. My effort to create a comfortable classroom also extends to my use of mostly low-stakes assignments intended to guide students through iterative learning with feedback that supports threshold proficiency and cultural diversity, rather than feedback that "dings" students for stylistic or other non-threshold issues.

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