Teaching Philosophy

My philosophy of teaching writing and communication courses is built on my ongoing research and my understanding of writing and communication as a social act embedded in both a larger cultural context and the immediate context. It is a collaborative process rooted in a discourse community. Employing various teaching methods and information technologies, I strive to engage my students in a stimulating, collaborative learning experience, where they learn to foster and develop critical thinking perspectives and socially situated writing skills to create user-centered information products.

To help students see writing as a mundane artifact and a social act, I seek to make my courses relevant to their lives and demonstrate the importance and ubiquity of writing. I believe it is more important to help students understand the contexts which surround and give rise to writing rather than just stressing formats and rules. Using case studies informed by genre theory, I familiarize students with recurrent writing situations of a specific genre. Before they draft their ideas, I first ask students to write a contextual or rhetorical analysis. I describe the audience as users. Issues of usability and accessibility and user-centered design principles are introduced to help students visualize use situations.

I think writing is best learned in practice. I strive to engage students in various writing exercises with stimulating activities. Most of my classes would integrate short lectures, class discussions, small group work, and short presentations into the same class session to accommodate different learning styles. I try to introduce different kinds of workshops for the same activity to keep students interested and challenged all the time. For example, peer review is conducted in different formats according to the nature of a writing project. Students might have a mock job fair for resume review in a technical communication class, later they might act as a grant evaluation committee rating proposals.

Adapting from the approach of participatory design, I regard students as “co-designers” who co-construct a collaborative learning community with me where they learn from each other and practice writing for realistic contexts. Group work is used intensively in all of my classes to foster collaborative skills among students. I also offer students the flexibility of learning choices and encourage them to explore the learning adventure as active learners in the forms of tutorials and presentations.

Writing is a both a tool and an objective. It is a technology itself while being mediated by various information technologies at the same time. The technological nature of writing has become more important in this knowledge economy. In my teaching I use different technologies to streamline the learning process. By promoting technology in a writing classroom, I am preparing my students for the challenges in a digital and visual age. My goal here is not only to achieve better instructional results but also to help students understand the implication of technologies, develop digital literacies important for writers, and eventually become an information designer who advocates user needs for mindful communication. 

I emphasize writing as a process rather than as a product in my instruction. I teach students to develop a process-oriented vision of writing by following a structured workflow process from invention to proofreading. For each major project, student performance is not only evaluated based on the final draft, but also the contextual analysis, the first draft, and peer review. Students are offered a chance to revise or rewrite the project. The rationale behind this rewrite matches what I tell my students on the first day of each writing course: I don’t expect students to turn in a piece of perfect writing, but I want to see progress and development in their writing through the term. One of my teaching goals is to best foster this development throughout the course.

Emphasizing contexts help me bridge the divide between academia and industry and better prepare students for real-world writing. Students come to realize that a final piece of professional writing is not just a piece of typed writing turned in to the instructor. It might be an informational brochure about a school cafeteria, a technology review of a new cell phone that appears on an IT magazine, or a manual of home brewing for a local community. Students have begun to envision each writing assignment as a genre that operates in a particular context and addresses issues of usability and accessibility through good information design.