April Conway

Teaching Philosophy
As a feminist teacher-scholar, I believe that cultivating agency and fostering connections to advocate
for oneself and ones communities is crucial to how I approach teaching. My teaching and research
focus on research methods and methodologies, and on civic rhetorics and literacy practices as affected
by culture and place. These interests are influenced by a desire to change dominant narratives and
material realities for misrepresented and underserved communities. As an educator who often teaches
underserved student populations, I work with all students to promote their sense of agency through
numerous literacy and research practices, and to help students build networks between academic and
non-academic concepts and spaces.
One way I promote agency and the process of making connections is to have students engage with
literacy practices that cross spaces. For example, in an intermediate writing course with a service
learning component, students were asked to partner with a community organization, such as a food
bank or a nature conservancy. While serving, they identified literacy practices central to the
organization, like intercommunication skills with volunteers, writing an article for a newsletter, or
learning to recognize native plant species. Students then reflected on these literacies in an essay that
focused on the relationships between civic engagement, place, and culture. Students were also asked
to write a research essay about literacy practicessuch as specific technology skills or disciplinary
discoursesrelated to their majors or desired professions. These interrelated assignments encouraged
flexible thinking about literacy, asked for synthesis of ideas in and across compositions, and required
reflections about academic and non-academic inter-connections that arose in course readings and
experiences. Students excelled in all of these assignments, though one of the most powerful outcomes
of the course was when a few students who were initially resistant to service-learning later expressed
how much they had discovered about the issue they worked on. One student, for instance, who had not
realized there was a homeless population in the region, volunteered at a resource center for the
homeless and wanted to volunteer at the center in the future. As fostering agency for self and
community is essential to my feminist pedagogy, I believe students demonstrated acts of
empowerment as citizens, students, and professionals in the course.
The application of connecting literacies, research, and composing practices is explicit in the first-year
writing courses I teach. During a research unit, students and I discussed how to locate, evaluate and
incorporate popular sources along with academic sources to support different rhetorical moves. One
student, for example, wanted to argue that Doctor Who fandom practices are similar to religious
practices, and so she used fan websites, television episodes, and science fiction magazine reviews to
complement her academic research; the result was a dynamic and well-argued essay. Students made
connections across modes as they researched, drafted, critiqued, and revised in alphabetic and digital
forms. They also transferred their arguments from the long-form print essay to a visually and digitally
supported oral presentation. Many students stood out as they entered into complex academic
conversations about topics of their choice, like race and gender. These students not only articulated
their arguments in writing, but also fielded questions from me and their peers during their
presentations. Throughout this unit, students engaged with various literacy practices as they
demonstrated proficiency and confidence as writing scholars in their first college-level writing course.
As a feminist teacher, creating opportunities for students to cultivate agency is important to my
pedagogy, and how I utilize space helps me meet this goal. A specific example of this in the classroom is
when I used a speed dating model for students to share research topics. We arranged the desks in rows
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facing each other, and one group of students rotated through so that each student was able to
articulate their ideas with and receive feedback from multiple peers. Not only were the students highly
engaged with this activity, but they later told me how much they were able to develop their research
topics from the lesson, which was demonstrated in their essays. In this case and others, the classroom
becomes a dynamic space for learning as students share the responsibility of contributing their prior
and growing knowledge with the me and their peers.
In addition to classroom space, I use institutional, digital, and community spaces to foster agency. For
instance, I had my first-year writing students participate in a scavenger hunt in the university library and
share what theyd discovered in a class discussion. Students shared that they had not previously known
where books were located, nor realized that our library housed music, archival, and popular culture
libraries. In an intermediate writing class, students explored digital spaces when they created
multimodal literacy narratives published on an online platform of their choice. The students were very
eager to share their inventive narratives, especially one student who created a multimodal Twitter
account about learning Czech in Prague and then posted her narrative to the Digital Archive for Literacy
Narratives. Furthermore, I ask students to engage with community spaces, such as when I required my
developmental writing students to visit a site important to them and to write a travelogue about this
location. Students expressed enthusiasm about the travelogue, and I noted that during and after this
assignment the students confidence in their writing abilities improved. Utilizing spaces in and beyond
the classroom allows students to draw on previous literacies, to hone new ones, and to recognize
themselves and their peers as producers of innovative knowledge and content.
By asking students to contemplate and make connections across ideas, methods, modes, and spaces,
and between people, my aim as a feminist teacher-scholar is to honor the experiences of students while
affording them the opportunity to enrich their academic, professional, and civic selves. This means
teaching so that students are able to change dominant narratives and material realities for
misrepresented and underserved communitiesperhaps communities of which they are a part
through numerous literacy practices and critical engagement with civic rhetorical acts.