I started teaching in first-year writing, and because I worked with those beginner college students, it has always been important to me to center my students’ rhetorical autonomy whenever I can in my teaching. That is, students take the lead in setting their own writing goals and deciding on their own research subjects, and my role as their instructor is to 1) identify what students already know and explain additional rhetorical tools for writing, such as locating genre conventions or analyzing effective audience appeals, and 2) encourage and make clear the benefits of iteration, collaboration, and embracing messy first drafts.
Rather than position myself as the expert on the types of writing my students will do—in their own disciplines, professional lives, or otherwise—I focus on teaching tools of analysis that help students better understand writing tasks for themselves. Here, I draw on both teaching experience in first-year writing and in faculty training seminars based in Writing in the Disciplines (WID) methods. For example, drawing from Miller (1984), I recycle genre heuristics from that seminar when I teach first-year students to prompt them to investigate genres of their disciplines through in-class activities. Just like WID practices center faculty in the disciplines as the experts on what writing genres and tasks value in their fields, I position students as just as competent at discovering what good writing means for them and their rhetorical situations. This approach to student learning arises from my first experiences as a writing center tutor at my undergraduate institution, Northern Kentucky University, a regional comprehensive university where many of my clients were nontraditional-aged learners.
My goal is for students to rely on their own rhetorical knowledge to develop a better understanding of increasingly challenging writing tasks on their own terms. This applies to students at all levels: as graduate writers develop their own research agendas, for example, the importance of identifying that implicit writing knowledge becomes more important as writing tasks become more complex and higher-stakes. That is, how is background literature treated differently in articles and dissertation chapters? How do we write grant applications that make clear what we do to those outside our fields? How do we remain flexible with our research presentation and goals so we can write across audiences and genres with different needs? As an educator, I encourage these skills among my peers and colleagues by sharing and discussing example materials like grant applications and formal letters. Transparent and critical conversations with my colleagues (faculty and students) about these writing tasks help other writers analyze and improve their approaches to writing, meaning this analysis leads to a set of transferable skills and knowledge that help writers more confidently tackle new tasks and genres.
When students can identify the needs of a writing task, they can also adjust writing processes to meet the task—which is why my teaching emphasizes the messiness of first drafts, the importance of iteration, and how to seek feedback and collaboration. These are standards of most writing courses, but I am seeking opportunities to make them more real and urgent to my students. As I piloted an embedded tutoring aspect in my summer 2023 Introductory Composition course, for example, I planned workshop and peer review days with embedded tutors. Students were encouraged to submit incomplete, patchy drafts for one peer review. Then, we discussed what comes after feedback, the differences between revising and editing, the time constraints of an accelerated course, and the value of available potential resources for moving writing forward after feedback. My students and I created revision plans, and I prompted students to name specific questions they could be asking embedded tutors when working on their projects. Additionally, I model seeking feedback by making use of my campus Writing Lab–and telling my students about my appointments–because even doctoral candidates and faculty need multiple sources of feedback.
Healthy writing habits include seeking support and feedback, as well as understanding where one is in the process—and this applies at all levels of writing and writing instruction. For graduate students, instilling this principle remains true but may look a little different: one effective model I use now and hope to continue with is the graduate Research Group model with the collaboration like what my advisor encourages, where students and mentors meet regularly to share progress on research projects and ask for feedback in a lower-stakes setting (Dilger, 2023). This enriches the mentoring students receive, as they benefit from peer-to-peer feedback alongside traditional modes of feedback from their faculty mentors. Undergraduate students, graduate students, and more advanced researchers benefit when their comfort with messy first drafts helps them seek feedback and turn those into better iterations on drafts.Overall, I find that this focus on process and iteration allows students to feel more comfortable with the messy beginnings of writing, which, in turn, highlights their skills as researchers and values the rhetorical knowledge they already have. As students embrace discovering new ways of approaching writing, they become better at generating multiple drafts and seeking feedback and add to their rhetorical knowledge. My teaching philosophy is grounded in recognizing students as autonomous adults (even those in FYW) with skills and experiences that already shape them as writers. All levels of writers benefit from rhetorical tools and a healthy iteration/collaboration cycle because both mean their writing meets the needs of the genre and of the writer. My main task as a teacher, then, is to help writers embrace a process that makes their knowledge and abilities the most visible to their audiences.
Marisa Yerace 