8/6/2019 TeachingPhilosophy.pdf

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teaching philosophybonnie lenore kyburz

associate professor, rhetoric and compositionutah valley university

bonnie lenore kyburz • bonnie.kyburz@gmail.com • 801.602.6968

8/6/2019 TeachingPhilosophy.pdf

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I was drawn into the field of Rhetoric andCompositionwhen I read Mike Rose’sLives on the Boundary: TheStruggles and Achievements of America’sUnderprepar ed (Free Press, 1989). I myself had been radicallyunderprepared for college when I began “studying” in the early eighties. For the most part, I studied punkrock, performed in several bands, rarely went to class, and was eventually placed on “permanentsuspension.” Returning to college years later and far more ideally motivated, Rose’s stories activated adesire in me, and I began to wonder if I might do the kinds of good work he had done. I responded positivelyand soon became fairly enchanted.

By now, you are registering my words as one of many “conversion narratives” we find so often within thefield. I hope that you see also that my enchantment derives from my failures, from my “borderland”experience; it is my sense that working in the interstitial spaces of institutional life has been the difference. Iam drawn to disorientation and disruption as states of being most conducive to change and emergence. Ifind pedagogical value in seeking to work within the liminal spaces we find moving ghostly within academiclife, and it is from within these liminal spaces of possibility that I find my motivation to help students developa disposition to textual ambiguity and inquiry that motivates critical habits of mind, practice, and being.

If pressed to articulate my pedagogy briefly, I might say that I encourage an active, student-centered,

inquiry-based pedagogy. In my classrooms, I help students intuit and develop problematic and engagingquestions and concepts. Through sequential activities as well as immersion in the organic space of theclassroom, a space that lives and breathes in both face-to-face and virtual communities, I guide students todevelop their questions so that they become relevant both as “academic” subject matter and as potentiallyextra-institutional cultural texts that inspire both student authors and their readers. My pedagogical hope isthat such work aids students in the development of their academic literacies even as it promotes rhetoricalstudy and practice as venues for desirable change.

My students work to articulate their emergent affects and dispositions as fully-developed arguments usingmultiple media and modes. The student writing (“designing” ... “composing”) that I promote may evolve as atraditional print text; it may also emerge in non-print form, although there is always a print component to thework I assign, given an academic context that continues to privilege print-based expression and argument.Because of my concern for examining language in the context of thinking about knowledge and power, mystudents do not, responding to the demands of academic culture, always adopt alternative forms or hybridstyles in shaping their projects. Nevertheless, by raising the promises and possibilities of alternativerhetorics, it seems likely that students may develop an appreciably critical disposition toward textuality. Our work together thus motivates rhetorical awareness that prepares students to encounter and engage intextual practices in a wide variety of contexts, to respond to existing texts with care and sophistication, andto produce their own engaging and effective arguments within a given cultural context.

Finally, I want to emphasize that I abhor pedagogies that call upon students to become simply obedient.Instead, I encourage students to explore by thinking critically and with a sense of possibility as they work toproblematize positions in multivalent exchanges that shape the classroom experience. Through such

exchanges, I hope to promote pleasure and excitement as natural components of engaged, communalinquiry. I encourage students to see themselves as capable of guiding inquiry through dialogue,collaboration, peer mentoring, and (some) negotiation of course aims and texts. Over time, such practicesseem to promote students’ emergent critical and analytical thinking practices, engendering writing,designing, and composing skills that evidence increasingly sound reasoning and rhetorical sophistication.

image credit: Louis Recorder & Sandra Gibson viaInvisible Cinema

bonnie lenore kyburz • bonnie.kyburz@gmail.com • 801.602.6968