Overview

As an Assistant Professor of Composition at Eastern Kentucky University, I teach a variety of courses, from First Year Writing, to courses for Literature, Professional Writing, and English Education, to graduate classes. In my writing courses, I prioritize genre awareness and research as inquiry. In Introduction to Professional and Technical Writing, I introduce students to common professional genres. I emphasize that genres are not static, but change over time in response to audience needs. Using a shared Google Doc, students analyze and identify common features and conventions. They note variations and explain when and where those variations seem to occur. In this way, students learn the process for navigating new genres and audience needs. By focusing on variations, students are more prepared to go through the process of educating themselves about new genres they may encounter in the workplace. In Advanced Composition, students read about genre as social action (Yancey); they frame inquiry questions about a kind of text they believe may represent a distinct genre or subgenre, collect examples and supporting documents, and write their own analyses. Students succeed at the assignment based on how they go through the process of applying research questions and genre theory as an interpretive frame. Through this assignment, students learn about genre, analysis, and the process of inquiry. In Developmental Reading and Writing, students learn about genre conventions as part of rhetorical analysis. They identify the conventions of audio essays, such as presented in NPR’s This American Life. They enact those conventions in their own audio essays about a song or artist using Audacity, free cross-platform audio-editing software. Through this assignment sequence, students see genre as important in places outside of the classroom and gain experience with analyzing and creating non-traditional, digital texts. In all my classes, I encourage students to experiment with new genres and modalities with an emphasis on understanding the why behind particular rhetorical choices and conventions.