Teaching Statement

The heart of my teaching philosophy is “agency,” which is not only an essential rhetorical ability that empowers people in general communication but also a concept that invites thinking about the questions of composition classrooms: how do teachers and students act in multimodal composition classrooms to gain stronger agency? How can students succeed in their communication by experiencing their agency? To allow agency to emerge, my composition classroom always encourages “artistry or crafts,” which is seen as a way for individuals to learn agency. (Campbell, 2005) I set the goals below:

  • Allow students to make things and cultivate it as a habit. In making things, students apply their practical knowledge in their learning activities or assignments.
  • Use multimodal materials to get students engaged. Specifically, I would emphasize the dominant visual media like videos or interactive webpages, which allow a higher level of agency (Kostelnick, 2019).
  • Encourage participation. The agency is participatory: by identifying their roles in the collaborative learning process, they will get the chance to identify and express their intention by participation.

In the multimodal composition classroom at Iowa State University, I teach writing, multimodality, and portfolio. Teaching multimodality, it is natural to require students to make things like posters, book covers, or children’s picture books, among others. However, it is not that natural to understand writing under the concept of “making,” which may imply less stress on the “correct writing” or “standard writing.” I navigate this issue using the framework of the rhetorical situation, by which I could still set proper goals for the writing components. Based on the nature of making things, I also aim to teach skills that can merge into their everyday lives. For example, I teach students to use notebooks to keep a journal, using different forms: collages and one-page autobiographic comics, among others. Cultivating the habits of the journal is a site of agency.

In the classroom setting, I use multimodal means to present knowledge and get students involved. For example, I used different interactive webpages to teach specific theories or knowledge, such as “The Color Game,” a game that requires students to match colors by choosing the color in the color wheel and training their color perception. By doing this, students have a certain level of agency; according to the study by Rawlins and Wilson (2014), a higher level of interactivity allows more user agency. Instead of merely listening to color theory, students experience color theory at a foundational level. After that, students can better create their mood boards with a richer color perception.

Participatory is also the key to increasing agency. By participating in mutual activities and sharing their perspective, students are empowered by realizing and identifying their own perspectives they haven’t realized before. When I was a lecturer in China, I designed activities outside of the classroom based on the concept of “walking,” which was developed as a research method (O’Neill & Roberts, 2019). Students did mini fieldwork as they walked. They were required to mark their routes by GPS, record the videos, or take pictures as they walked. After that, students shared their understanding and perceptions of walking and realized that the experience they got so used to was not as ubiquitous as they thought. By sharing their lived experience, students felt acknowledged and cultivated agency to communicate their everyday lives.

In conclusion, my multimodal composition class has benefited from the emphasis on agency in several ways: cultivating long-term goals, reinforcing understanding of knowledge, and empowering students by encouraging them to realize the value of their everyday lives. In the future, updating the activities design according to the changing media environment is what I will focus on, but the agency will still be the core principle of my teaching.

Reference

Campbell, K. K. (2005). Agency: Promiscuous and Protean. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2(1), 1–19.

Kostelnick, C. (2019). Humanizing Visual Design: The Rhetoric of Human Forms in Practical Communication (1st edition). Routledge.

O’Neill, M., & Roberts, B. (2019). Walking Methods: Research on the Move. Routledge.

Teaching Practices

An example created by me using the photo of my cat, Shuan Shuan. I used the same photo in the three frames to show how different framing can create rich layers of meaning.

Photo Comics

In John Berger’s (2008) book Ways of Seeing, he elucidated how different framing of the same picture can create various meanings. Inspired by him, I introduced “photo comics” and designed the practice based on it. Photo comics is a genre that uses photographs instead of illustrations to make comics, once used by health educators. The example I found is A Softer World by Joey Comeau and Emily Horne (Figure 1), entailing the thought of John Berger and framing theory.

I also create my own example using the photo of my cat, Shuan Shuan (See the cover picture). In the classroom, I briefly introduce the photo comics and give a step-by-step guide to let students make their own. This practice increased students’ agency by allowing them to reframe their everyday experiences and learn to create a popular genre within their own capacity. This practice was successful; students enjoyed it and created many interesting photo comics. 

The simulation website I built for students’ reference. The profile photo is my cat.

Website Portfolio

I also created a student website collection page. By doing this, I further reinforce students’ agency because this allows students to open their websites to broader audiences, which is considered a major feature of the agency. (Miller, 2007)

Gathering all these thoughts, I created a detailed instruction to guide students to build the webpage step by step I also showed the steps in the classroom to clarify the operation since the technical issue can be subtle and various.

As a result, many students built their websites early on and added to the website collection page. This method works; students attempt to present their personalities and aesthetics and create a conversation between their websites and audiences.

There are still technical challenges involved in this method: many students haven’t figured out how to publish their websites with shorter links, which rely on the education plan of Notion. Students can access the education plan for free using their Iowa States account. However, sometimes, it just doesn’t work ‘on some student’s platforms while other students work. The technical details need to be considered further.

The Padlet for study groups, providing a space for material sharing and collection.

To create study groups, I decided to create a public discussion space on Padlet. This platform allows teachers and students to share their materials and design process (Figure 10.) I put the resources for the Multimodal Remix assignment, set the instructional post, and asked students to upload their process during the class. This strategy worked well, but students seldom commented on the other students except for peer review. Next semester, I will explore the function of the Padlet further and try to reserve more space and agency for students.

In this invited lecture, I gave a lecture focusing on the word and image interaction in scientific picturebooks. I also communicated with the local primary teachers about scientific picture books and talked about the local curriculum setting, the devices, and how to enhance scientific literacy through picture books. We all agreed that selecting picture books that allow more aspects of the interaction between the young readers and the book itself helps elicit interest the most. Selecting picture books that are more relevant to the local culture helps students understand scientific knowledge better as well.