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April Conway

Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher-scholar, my primary goal is help students critically think and compose as means to
cultivate agency for themselves and their communities. This goal is related to a commitment to change
dominant narratives and material conditions for underserved communities. As an educator who often
works with underserved students, I teach all students how to develop academic and civic agency and
how to build networks with and between communities through diverse literacy practices.
To help students critically think and compose while practicing diverse literate activities, my students
engage with different communities as part of research and service learning projects. For example, in a
first-year academic writing course, students wrote a research essay about a community of which they
were a part. One student chose her gymnastics team, for example, and another wrote about the ItalianAmerican neighborhood where she grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. After studying best practices for
conducting interviews, students interviewed another member of their chosen community. The students
also incorporated auto-ethnographic field notes along with scholarly sources into their essays.
Furthermore, in an intermediate writing course I designed and taught, students were asked to partner
with a community organization of their choice. While serving, students identified literacy practices
central to the organization. Students then reflected on these literacies in an essay that focused on the
relationships between civic engagement, literacy, and place. Students were also asked to write a
research essay about how the culture of their major or desired profession influences literacy practices
such as technology skills or disciplinary discoursesin those majors or 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 communities that arose in
course readings and experiences. My 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 pedagogy, I believe students demonstrated acts of
empowerment as citizens, students, and professionals in both courses.
I have also encouraged my students to think and compose critically in diverse communities by
designing digital learning outcomes. For example, in an intermediate writing class, students created
multimodal literacy narratives published on the online platforms Cowbird and the Digital Archive of
Literacy Narratives. The students were very eager to share their inventive narratives, including one
student who used iMovie to compose her narrative of learning how to be a black girl in a predominantly
white school and another student who developed a narrative by creating a Twitter profile about
learning Czech in Prague. Furthermore, students were expected to facilitate content on a course blog.
For example, students were in charge of posting reading response questions for their peers and they
also developed and posted a lexicon of key concept words that they identified in the readings. These
assignments facilitated academic writing, reading, and critical thinking principles as conducted through
digital and multimodal means. This emphasis of digital rhetorics underscores national learning
objectives in and beyond composition classrooms. Finally, students participation in these digital
activities demonstrates their abilities to promote their and their peers learning.
To promote critical thinking and writing in academic spaces, I have my students engage with different
community-based activities. One example of this is a scavenger hunt in the universitys library so that
first-year students become familiar with the librarys resources. Students enjoyed this activity because

April Conway
Teaching Philosophy
they worked with peers to become knowledgeable about an institutional space. Another example is
when I taught a pre-writing workshop modeled on speed dating. With this activity, each student was
able to share their research topic ideas with and receive feedback from multiple peers. Not only were
the students highly engaged with this lesson, but they later told me how much they were able to
develop their research topics. This enthusiasm and learning carried over into their essays. Many
students stood out as emerging scholars as they entered into complex academic conversations about
their topics of choice, topics such as race and gender. Throughout this research unit, students engaged
with various literacy practices as they demonstrated proficiency and confidence as writing scholars. In
these instances and others, the university and the classroom are dynamic spaces for learning as
students share the responsibility of contributing their prior and growing knowledge with the me and
their peers.
By asking students to contemplate and make connections across ideas, methods, modes, and
communities, 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.

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