In the tradition of the dispute between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae as to the nature of a writing classroom, I often find myself trying to strike a balance between being a writer and an academic, an artist and a scholar. Bartholomae’s concern with the preparation of students for the academy clashes with Elbow’s expressivist focus on the growth of students into writers. While some students value empowerment and the opportunity to express their feelings and identities on paper, others want no part of it, insisting that they be taught how to write argumentative essays, business letters, and research papers aimed at getting them a job after graduation. Regardless of whether I try to teach writing from the point of view of an artist or an academic, one thing remains constant for me: I want my students to successfully find their own entry points into their writing.

At heart, I believe that knowledge is created through conversation. Class often begins with short freewrites so that students can take a couple of minutes to prepare themselves for conversation. Then over the course of a class discussion, differing viewpoints and belief systems overlap, and knowledge is created in the resulting contact zones. Admittedly, teaching in the contact zone can be dangerous as preconceived notions butt up against firm immovable beliefs, but the facilitation of conversation is a strong point of mine, and part of this is because I temper my belief in the freedom of a conversation with my faith in the classroom as a safe place for the exchange of ideas. Without such safety, conversations in the contact zone can become antagonistic and generally fruitless.

Still, as much as I value conversation as a pedagogical tool, I do not restrict my classroom practice to group work. While I believe that students often possess more knowledge than they might realize, I also believe that a teacher can step in with the voice of experience. For example, in preparation for an assignment revolving around commodification in print advertisements, I have students start in groups looking at advertisements and noting all the details they think are notable—the way the woman’s hair obscures her face, the way the man’s abdominal muscles ripple on the page. Once they have identified the objectification of the people in the ads, we turn to our secondary texts to help us figure out how to talk in specific terms about objectification and what it means to the viewer. The group work turns into a lecture about ideology and hegemony, and then we return to a class discussion so that the students can attempt to claim the terms as their own for the essays they will write about advertisements that they find themselves. In this sense, through a balance of lectures and group-work, I strive to create a learning experience in class.

Writing is a mode of thinking. In “The Shifting Relationships Between Speech and Writing,” Peter Elbow says that “writing is a surrogate mind instead of just a mouthpiece of the mind. The mind, as a structure of meaning, can grow and develop through stages, and so too can a piece of writing. Thus writing provides us with two organisms for thinking instead of just one, two containers instead of just one; the thoughts can go back and forth, richen and grow”(72). Writing is a crucial way in which humans relate to language, and how we make sense of the world. Students use writing to decipher complex texts or to claim authority over a particular subject. They write huge, messy first drafts so they can figure out what materials are in front of them with which they can work. I believe that teaching students to be craftspeople who work with words and language gives them the tools necessary to sculpt their words and ideas into a purposeful text.

When I started teaching, I was skeptical about the plausibility of this kind of student empowerment in a college composition course, but the results I have gotten in my classroom keeps me confident about my classroom praxis. Because writing courses are so focused on the revision process, students are encouraged to strive for the good grades that they want. My time as a writing tutor helps me work with them in conferences to help them find their routes into assignments in a way that is interesting to them—and as students become invested in their subjects, they produce writing that is as energetic and exciting as it is thoughtful. In this sense, my love of teaching is fueled by the work that my students produce.

Since coming to teach in the Department of Writing at Grand Valley State University, the product-heavy grading in the WRT 150 portfolio system allows me to coach students toward the final portfolio, and makes for a course in which students must invest in revision to be successful. The portfolio system allows me to use concrete grading criteria to balance teaching process with product. I can push my students toward being more conscientious of their rhetorical strategies with a larger academic community in mind—they write for a reader, and not just a teacher, and the result is some of the more successful student writing than I have encountered elsewhere. In this sense, teaching in the portfolio system has made me a better teacher in that it highlights the philosophical conflict within my own beliefs—artful empowerment co-exists with academic authority as students work through the long revision process.

Classroom technology helps me more and more to maintain a classroom that is predictable in its operation and dependable in its availability. I use Blackboard in every class, supplemented with hyper-linked web-lectures that don’t recreate our class discussions for students as much as they enhance the work we accomplish in class. The announcements and reminders I post, as well as the use of Blackboard as the hub around which all course documents are saved and distributed, gives students access to the class regardless of their time or place. I often use the projectors in our classrooms to use student work as models for writing. I do this with student permission, of course, and the goal is not to reward or criticize anyone for their writing, but to demonstrate the critical eyes with which I would like them to read, and to help them understand the ways in which writing might be read and evaluated by both their fellow students as well as their teachers.

Ultimately, I think that my teaching philosophy is aptly summarized by Richard Young when he says that teachers “must become designers of occasions that stimulate the creative process” (78). As I think about my teaching strategies, everything seems to come down to more effectively fostering the creativity within my students to help them craft their own texts for the academy. At the base level, students create college essays, but on a deeper level, students create personal truth through argument, they create understanding through analysis, and they create knowledge through conversation and writing. I try to empower students in their writing by asking them to take ownership of the projects at hand, to find their places within the realms of language. I ask that they become writers as well as scholars. For me, the importance of creativity in a composition course lies in the student learning his or her own process of discovery, invention, and construction in writing. It’s this kind of creativity that I hope that my students will be able to take with them into their other classes and into the world beyond the academy.