It was only when I took “Approaches to Teaching Writing” with Professor Tilden my first semester at Georgetown that I realized that my freshman friends and I had unknowingly been a part of the evolving conversation surrounding the composition classroom.
“Approaches to Teaching Writing” transformed my understanding of the writing classroom as a dynamic space--reading theorists such as Peter Elbow, Ann Merle Feldman, and Nancy Sommers deeply influenced my thinking about the role of the teacher in the classroom, the importance of genre in shaping student writing, and the process of revision. I also had the opportunity to debate, sometimes heatedly, with other students who showed me how to articulate my beliefs about composition.
I was also deeply influenced by “The Rhetorical Turn,” a course I took with Professor Pavesich, which helped me develop my ideas from "Approaches" and explore how genre shapes academic, professional, and everyday writing. Anis Bawarshi’s work on genre was particularly significant to me, as well as Jenny Edbauer Rice’s work on rhetorical ecologies. Both of these theorists have influenced my thinking throughout this project. My final paper for "The Rhetorical Turn" focused on online identity formation in two groups of female bloggers. This project sparked my interest in motherhood as an academic subject and serves as one of the founding texts of this project.
My own research lead me to Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s essay “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies.’” Their work on making the first year writing classroom a space for teaching a “more realistic writing narrative” and introducing composition as a discipline has shaped my vision for my own writing classroom. Helping students to discover their own writing processes has become increasingly important to me.
My freshman year of undergraduate I took an enjoyable honors writing course with a very enthusiastic professor. However, talking with my friends I soon discovered that their classes were very different than mine. Some courses focused almost exclusively on grammar and mechanics while other students wrote only research papers and avoided personal writing. At the time, I shrugged this off as differences of personal preference between teachers...