William Rincon

ENC 5705

Professor Rounsaville

05/01/2018

Will Rincón’s Teaching Philosophy

As a teacher of writing, I know my students already engage in writing activities every day for

many purposes. Students know how to write. My goal as a teacher is to help students improve

their understanding of why writing communications is always tailored to rhetorical situations and

to teach them how to navigate different genres effectively. I believe that writing effectively

requires recognizing the rhetorical situation, understanding the context and genre of the writing,

engaging in a recursive writing process and addressing the rhetorical situation appropriately.

These are the concepts that form the foundation of my course content. Because writing is a

process for everyone, I can teach these concepts in ways that directly relate to students in a

composition class that studies the nature of writing and explores different writing processes. This

approach allows me to share what I know about writing and lay the groundwork for transfer into

other areas of their education and lives, benefitting them far beyond my classroom.

To teach about writing from this standpoint, I need to appeal to my students needs as writers.

Provoke them to think about how writing works in discourse communities that they are both

familiar or unfamiliar with. Prompt them to question why different values are important to

different communities. Ask themselves why they place value in the genres that they enjoy. Most

importantly, it is paramount to me that they understand that very little academic research is spent

on a topic that the researcher disliked or found uninteresting. This approach to research is almost
always new to students, and I believe it places more value in the time they spend working on

their assignments. To illustrate this, I spend a day with them brainstorming different discourse

communities to help them choose a topic of their own. I present them with communities that I

myself am part of, like chess, and how many terms and lingo is known only to those who play

chess. By introducing my own interests and highlighting many of theirs through our brainstorm, I

hope to engage with them on a more personal level as they enter the world of writing and how

the conversations within communities are continually ongoing.

With my approach to teaching, I hope students meet the challenges of producing texts that meet

the expectations of academic communities more enthusiastically than they would have in

composition classes that make them research topics they have little to no interest in. To further

this enthusiasm, I try to make my assignment sequence as straight-forward as possible, with clear

goals and tasks that build on one another. These assignments begin with low-stake readings and

annotations to help them familiarize with course concepts like discourse communities, rhetorical

situations, genre transfer. These low stakes assignments build on themselves from week to week

and accumulate into three larger tasks over the semester. Each task receives five weeks of

attention and has the students engaging in journaling, outlining, synthesizing, and providing

feedback to their peers. By providing feedback through each process of work, I can facilitate my

students understanding of difficult concepts and become flexible to their specific needs.

As a result, my students do not become overwhelmed with producing new work every other

week, but instead accumulate their work throughout the semester into one research paper that

won’t feel rushed. They can proudly look at not only their own accumulative work, but the work
of their peers, which they will have become familiar with through in-class group work,

discussions, writings, and workshops. This gradual buildup also gives students who may struggle

achieving course outcomes plenty of opportunities to meet with me one-on-one throughout the

semester, as individual meetings are already scheduled into the coursework. If a student still fails

to meet course expectations I use that as an opportunity to adjust my assignment sequence and

search for areas where I can improve something. Overall, my first priority in teaching is to

provide a safe and scaffolded learning environment to help my students begin to engage with

course concepts by finding their voices in the classroom, in their writing, and in in their

experiences.