Over the past few months, as I watched this election unfold and began teaching for the first time, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want my teaching to do. I teach freshman composition, so I want my students to understand and compose argument, but there’s an opportunity in teaching writing to show students how to interact with(in) their community.
I’ve got a considerable amount of freedom with my syllabus, so I’ve been teaching my first-year composition classes through the lenses “ecocomposition” (as expressed by Dobrin & Weisser) and rhetoric as a tool for “urban community management” (as expressed by the Sophists, since forever). I also think it’s important for my students to see the kinds of impact they can have on their environment, so my writing assignments have them focus on spaces, places, people, and issues within their immediate communities, either the university, the city of Tempe, or their hometowns. We almost always look at local urban issues, or global sustainability issues. And though I’m still hammering out the formal pedagogy, I’ve come up with this one-liner that’s stuck with me over the past year: “Learn, Act, Teach.”
Context presupposes any particular piece of writing, so when my students investigate issues, they learn about the history of that issue, the participants and stakeholders, and, generally, the “why’s” of any given piece.
In addition to having a context, writing also has a purpose. So, over the next two weeks, we’re looking at formal rhetorical analysis. My students select a text or material “argument” (situated in some context) and identify what the argument is doing, or how it tries to get its audience to act. Once they understand how this works by analyzing other texts, we’ll move into drafting our own arguments, so they can act through (and with) their writing.
And writing is fundamentally about sharing. Writing exists because of and for communities. So, once my students can identify different writing genres, can compose argument, and analyze others’ texts, they’ll go into their own communities to teach their friends and neighbors about particular issues and advocate for their stances on the problems and resolutions within the urbs.
As I mentioned, I’m still tacking down the pedagogy, so if any of y’all feel like talking with me about this, please reach out.
In my next post, I’ll talk about how I’m using digital texts and video-games to create “new publics,” where my students can play in and play with these ideas of community management and stakeholders. Then, after that, back to food and local sustainability tactics.