​I center student agency, cultivation of meaningful relationships, and civic engagement in my teaching of first year writing. I find these principled goals important to student preparedness as thinking individuals, actively informed community members, and effective collaborators. These tenets of my teaching philosophy develop writing and rhetorical skills beneficial to succeeding in my class, writing across disciplines, writing in the workplace, and writing throughout the student’s life.  

 

Student agency refers to students’ willingness and capacity to take action in pursuit of goals. Students who retain agency over themselves and their choices are better prepared to effect desired changes to a situation. This is, and becomes, increasingly important in an age of technology-assisted writing processes. Contemporary changes to writing mediums, such as the transition from corporate printed materials to websites, vastly improved the condition, efficacy, and marketability for those companies familiar with writing for websites. Those without the agentic capacity fell behind. 

 

We’re at a similar, but more drastic, time in the development of GenAI tools for writing. Large Language Models are able to write content that students have little role or agency in creating. If fully outsourced, this impedes student development vis a vis the human value of writing: writing to learn, writing to think, and writing to connect with other humans. As such, I center the value of human oversight and agency in GenAI-mediated writing processes. I do this by teaching students to identify and consider their personal and social values in relation to their writing practices. I encourage students to recognize what can be outsourced, what should remain human, and why, through practice and reflective activities. This capacity for agency, guided by recognition of the human values of writing, is dually important for cultivating meaningful relationships.

 

Cultivating meaningful relationships requires a rhetorical sensitivity applied in all communicative contexts, and namely through writing. Those students that cultivate meaningful relationships report more meaningful engagement as learners, more personal satisfaction, and are more effective at achieving their communicative goals across contents (workplace, educational, personal). In recognition of this, I employ a discussion-based pedagogy in the classroom that encourages students to share their work, their experiences, and their writing with one another. This, I’ve observed, encourages students to interact with each other in ways that promote shared understanding and connection.
 

I recognize that this may be alien to students, especially to those who spent significant portions of their education in online environments, and lack the social experience. As such, I find it important to create a safe and welcoming environment that explicitly addresses the rhetorical value of listening, empathy, and connection. I enforce this throughout the semester, introducing the practice by asking students to send me a short email with two positive personal experiences in their education, and two negative experiences. This allows me to personally connect with students early in the semester, empathize with them through their experiences, and set an inviting tone for teacher-student and student-class interactions through the semester. I also encourage group work, emphasizing that students have much to learn from their peers. As such, I teach in-class collaborative activities and facilitate collaborative discussions, often guided by students with me as mediator. I also have much to learn from my students with regard to how they communicate and how they best learn. Maintaining meaningful relationships with my students allows me to iteratively reflect on my teaching process and outcomes to adapt teaching practices as needed. My teaching of student agency and cultivation of meaningful relationships prepares students to communicate with each other, and people outside of the course, in order to accomplish their goals. I extend this prowess to communicative contexts with the entire class community, and their communities beyond, with a final tenet of civic engagement.

 

Civic engagement involves taking actions to promote harmony and civil discourse in a community. I teach students to view the classroom as a community they are citizens of, and so responsible for. As such, in learning to write and communicate with rhetorical acuity, students must be aware of, and educated in, the principles of civil discourse necessary to build a culture of respect and promote the exchange of ideas.

 

Instructors can’t expect students to know the rules of the game unless we teach them and so I devote time in my teaching to co-creating with students a set of rules for engagement in the classroom community. We examine how principles such as “do not speak when someone else is talking,” “avoid personal attacks,” or “use appropriate evidence to justify claims” work in theory and then revisit them throughout the semester as we practice civil discourse in our community. Also necessary for civic engagement is participation; we discuss how minimal participation can impede the flow of ideas and thus reduce learning for everyone in our community. Through the tenet of civic engagement, those actions required to keep a community civil and promote an exchange of ideas, I teach students how their communicative practices can impact the class, and future communities with which they engage.

 

Student agency, cultivating meaningful relationships, and civic engagement undergird all of my teaching practices and decisions. In promoting these scholarship driven tenets of writing success, I effectively prepare students to engage the writing and communicative contexts that they might encounter both in and out of the classroom.