Loyola Marymount University

As a part-time faculty member, I have been ineligible to serve on committees in Communication Studies or participate in undergraduate advising. However, I describe below various ways I have served my department and my students in an unofficial capacity during my time at LMU.

The Transition from FTF to Online Learning in March 2020

Because of hourly work restrictions during my first AY of employment at Loyola Marymount University (2019-2020), I missed the opportunity to participate in the coaching available to full-time faculty across the campus during the rapid Covid-19 transition to online learning in March of 2020. Instead, I initiated a collaboration with Janelle DolRayne, the Academic Affairs Associate for the University Core Curriculum, to create a Box Folder with a dozen subcategories of materials to be shared freely with full- and part-time Rhetorical Arts faculty. Some of these categories included reimagined assignments for the latter half of the Spring 2020 semester, such as persuasive podcasts and other options for delivering the “Persuasive Speech” asynchronously. We also gathered examples of online activities and lesson plans, and numerous links to resources from the Chronicle of Higher Education, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), and other pedagogical tutorials regarding building equity and inclusion into online writing instruction (OWI).

Fortunately, I was already an active user of our online Learning Management System at LMU, Brightspace (also known as D2L). I had already been using it for the distribution of readings, assignments, and announcements; the electronic submission and filing of student work; and as a tool for detailed record-keeping of attendance, homework assignments, and grades. I chose to continue teaching synchronously in Spring 2020 to maintain the strong sense of community and camaraderie we had already developed. Students reported that this provided them with a much-needed sense of continuity and support in a time of overwhelming upheaval. I also accommodated my one international student who returned to Singapore in March by recording all class sessions so that he could remain up to date and held separate one-on-one meetings with him in the narrow timeslot that worked between California and Singapore.

Summer Preparation for Remote Learning during AY 2020-2021

Although part-time faculty transitioned to exempt/salaried status in Fall 2020, because of the hourly work restrictions mentioned above, I was still unauthorized to participate in the university’s Zoom training offered by the Center for Teaching Excellence during the summer of 2020. Nor was I eligible for any of the Rhetorical Arts full-time faculty support sessions. However, my commitment to making the most of remote learning and serving my students to the highest degree remained firm. Instead of participating in programs established by the university, I joined the Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) and participated in weekly webinars offered by the Online Learning Consortium (OLC) and other Online Instruction (OLI) organizations. I read books, such as Teaching Effectively with Zoom, written by Dan Levy from Harvard University, and The Online Teaching Survival Guide, 2nd edition, by Judith V. Boettcher and Rita-Marie Conrad. I also scheduled demonstrations with representatives from online peer-review platforms, such as “Peerceptiv” and “Eli Review,” and learned basic editing-software skills from a friend in the film industry to record messages and brief lectures as professionally as possible.

In addition to transferring my teaching methodologies from a traditional FTF classroom into the virtual learning environment, I adjusted my lesson plans to incorporate the “Discussion” feature of Brightspace and make use of breakout rooms in Zoom. I doubled my usual office hours and met regularly by appointment with students who sought extra time with me as they adjusted to online learning. I also offered one-on-one, 1-hour conferences with all 36 of my students on three of the major assignments for the course and lifted my usual restriction against re-writing Final Drafts once graded. Moreover, I remained as flexible as possible regarding deadlines without sacrificing the integrity of staying on task throughout the semester. This allowed all my students to achieve their fullest potential on assignments during this profoundly challenging time in their personal and academic lives.

Fall 2020: The First Full Semester of Online Learning

Given the profound political and social unrest during the summer of 2020 and the national reckoning on systemic racism in the United States, it was a lucky time to teach a first-year writing course based on themes about social justice and environmental racism. I was impressed by my students’ engagement in class discussions, their small group work in Zoom Breakout rooms, and their vocal appreciation for the outlet this class afforded them to speak freely about the topics that matter deeply to them. This course helped them recognize and identify the narratives that have perpetuated oppression and inequity in our nation for so long while simultaneously developing the rhetorical skill to call out that discourse in a compelling and productive way.

Spring 2021: The Inequities of Online Learning for International Students

During Fall 2020, I did not have a single international student enrolled in my Rhetorical Arts sections. In Spring 2021, however, I taught a late-afternoon class to students across four time-zones in the United States and Canada, as well as six international students in Indonesia (+13 hours), China (+ 14 hours), Hong Kong (+14 hours), and Japan (+17 hours). While some were in an afternoon slump, others were skipping dinner, and others watched the sunrise after being online all night in their other classes. However, tricky timing for a synchronous class was not the only problem. One of my students from Indonesia notified me one day before the start of the course that he was unable to acquire any of his books, hard copy or electronic. I quickly learned this was the case for all my international students. I worked swiftly with Zakiya Hasan, Reserve and Copyright Supervisor, and Kathryn E. Ryan, Library Operations Manager, at the Hannon Library to solve this dilemma. They set up individual Box folders for my international students with time-limited PDFs of all the readings for my course while enabling us to remain in compliance with copyright law. The librarians were fantastic support during a particularly stressful 48 hours at the beginning of the semester. Their willingness to collaborate with me quickly to solve this pressing problem was commendable and greatly appreciated.

I then reached out to Anthony Perron, Director of the University Core Curriculum, and Janelle DolRayne, Academic Affairs Associate, to discuss the inequities and hardships facing our international students enrolled in synchronous Rhetorical Arts courses online that semester. Professor Perron forwarded my concerns to Michelle Hammers, Associate Dean for the College of Communication and Fine Arts, who acknowledged the difficulties and supported my efforts to go above and beyond what I was already doing to accommodate our international students during online learning. Some of my solutions included posting videos, modifying assignment delivery mechanisms, and offering alternative forms of participation options without having the students lose their sense of connection to me, their classmates, or the course.

There were no “magic bullets” to be found for any of these difficulties last year. My struggles were not unique, as we all forged our paths through the hazards of remote learning. Nonetheless, I was truly gratified to have received a 5.0 across six assessment categories, including the clarity of learning outcomes, constructive student/instructor interactions, instructor accessibility, quality of instructor feedback, challenging academic environment, and overall effectiveness of instruction.

Stanford University

Tutor in the Hume Center for Writing and Speaking

“The Hume Center for Writing and Speaking (Hume Center) works with all Stanford students to help them develop rich and varied abilities in every aspect of writing and oral communication. In free individual sessions, Hume tutors help students get started on assignments; address and overcome writer’s block or performance anxiety; learn strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading; and understand academic conventions in their fields.

Whether students are working on a written or oral project for a course or applying for a grant or job, our writing or speaking tutors can help them develop effective strategies and sharpen skills to improve their written or oral communication.

We provide support to students with one-to-one tutoring sessions, small group consultations, and workshops. We also foster a lively culture of writing and speaking on the Stanford campus by sponsoring writing boot camps and groups for graduate and undergraduate students as well as publications, by hosting presentations of student research, and by bringing together instructors with students and their parents for celebrations of writing and oral communication done in our community. We cooperate with faculty across the campus to support their use of writing and speaking in a variety of courses” (Hume Center Mission Statement).

My work at the Hume Center primarily involved individual meetings with undergraduate and graduate students seeking assistance at any point in the writing process. One day, I might have seen an undergraduate experiencing writer’s block in the face of an assignment for an anthropology class; another day, I might have worked with a graduate student in Education who was preparing a dissertation prospectus. As writing tutors, we worked with students on material as diverse as medical school applications, grant proposals, resume writing, academic essays, speeches, and cover letters. Whether they came to the Hume Center with an entirely written draft or had no sense of where to begin, we supported students through their challenges with writing at any level. During my time at the Hume Center, I worked as a writing tutor, a dissertation boot camp tutor, and a workshop leader.

Workshop Leader in the Hume Writing Center

One significant function of the Hume Center in its early days was the offering of workshops for small groups, often tailored to meet the needs of individual sections of “Introduction to the Humanities” (IHUM) or the “Program in Writing and Rhetoric” (PWR) courses. PWR and IHUM instructors would bring in their classes for workshops tailored to meet the needs of their students and to coincide with the themes of the class, such as “Dreams and Journeys” or “Problems of Citizenship,” for example. As a workshop leader, I facilitated small group sessions on topics such as “Beginning Your Research Project,” “Writing a Thesis Statement,” and “Evaluating Research Sources” by preparing activities and modeling research which revolved around the course theme.

As the mission and scope of the Hume Center grew over the years, we no longer offered these particular workshops. However, we still provided similar support to various organizations on campus on an as-needed basis. For example, I led two workshops a year at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) for seven years, working closely with Denise Masumoto, Corporate Relations Manager. I carefully re-designed two individual workshops with Denise’s input—the first offered in Autumn and the second in Winter—to support international graduate students writing their first academic research paper, tailored to an American university-level audience. We first worked on narrowing the scope of their research so that they could reasonably generate a 30-page report by the end of their one-year residency. Then, we concentrated on issues of organization and especially argumentation. Many of the students who join APARC come from cultures where making an “argument” (in the strictest sense of the word) is considered disrespectful or insubordinate. After my first two years as a workshop leader for APARC, it became clear that identifying and addressing this cultural standard was the key to helping this group of international students succeed at the task before them. Once I determined that this cultural belief was blocking students from engaging in the rhetoric of what we consider in the United States to be conventional academic argumentation, these talented scholars were able to excel in the production of new scholarship in their fields.

Stanford Undergraduate Sustainability Scholars Program (SUSS)

From 2010 to 2012, my former colleague, Mark Feldman, and I co-founded the Stanford Undergraduate Sustainability Scholars (SUSS). Supported by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education (VPUE) and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR), our organization was dedicated to exploring effective ways of communicating issues about sustainability and the Stanford campus.

SUSS funded two undergraduates per academic year to conduct research projects investigating the Stanford campus’s sustainability and publicizing those findings. My colleague managed our blog—SUSSing Sustainability @ Stanford—as a forum for sustainability-related ideas, projects, and debates. We also maintained a calendar of sustainability events, courses, and opportunities.

Our work was driven by our conviction that pressing contemporary environmental challenges will be solved only through persuasive and creative communication (written, spoken, digital, and visual). In other words, we maintained that rhetoric has a vital role in imagining a more sustainable future and persuading others to work towards that future. Although SUSS itself was short-lived, it was one of many stepping-stones to what is now PWR’s “Notation in Science Communication” (NSC). Just as SUSS was founded on the belief that rhetoric plays a critical role in the effective communication of the science and practice of sustainability, the NSC also reflects Stanford’s commitment to addressing society’s compelling need for strong communicative literacy among its scientists and engineers. It allows students to develop as specialists capable of explaining science in clear and convincing ways to a range of audiences. Through the NSC coursework, students also develop collaborative problem-solving skills and strategies for communication across media that will benefit them here at Stanford and in their future professional careers. This philosophy not only applies to the NSC, as it once did to SUSS but is also the very underpinning of my scholarship and pedagogy.

Pedagogy Host

In my early years at Stanford, graduate students in the doctoral programs in English, Comparative Literature, and Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford enrolled in a Pedagogy Seminar; they continued their Teaching Assistant training with a series of pedagogy workshops. One key component of the course included classroom visits and observing conferences led by an experienced PWR instructor.

As a “pedagogy host,” I had many graduate students visit my classroom, and I continued to support them as they embarked on their first teaching experiences during the winter and spring quarters. I also led various teaching practices workshops to help new instructors reflect on their classroom dynamics and adjust their teaching strategies in response to student needs.

Although the “pedagogy host” position no longer exists, I continued to make all of my teaching materials available to colleagues through our online resource center, continuing to share my handouts and teaching strategies freely with any instructor interested in such collaboration.

Teaching Practices Committee

Of the various committees within the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, I felt most naturally drawn to serve on the Teaching Practices Committee (TPC) because it connected most clearly with my interest in matters of pedagogy, both practical and theoretical. During the 2005-2006 academic year, I began working on a challenging but essential topic in the context of this committee:  the complex and contentious issue of grading practices and policies. Our committee was well-positioned to discuss this subject, as our members that year came from a variety of backgrounds, disparate programs, and distinct teaching environments. Some were able to provide essential perspectives on writing programs that operate outside the context of letter grades. At the same time, I, for example, was able to shed light on grading practices at large public universities, where there is a perceived need to maintain firm continuity across vast numbers of composition sections with ever-shifting teaching staff. The results of an anonymous grading policies survey administered to all PWR instructors enabled us to move the discussion forward in a productive way. The process proved critical to our self-evaluation process as we prepared for our program review the following year.

Teaching Practices Liaison to Program Review Committee

In addition to my active participation in the ongoing grading practices discussion in PWR, one of my most significant contributions to the program was my role as liaison between the TPC and the Program Review Committee during the 2006-2007 academic year. This job included the following responsibilities:  preparing for and attending regular TPC meetings and Review Committee meetings; a systematic and timely collection of teaching materials from instructors as data for the self-study; organization of those data; outlining a methodology for the analysis of materials gathered; analysis and summary of results (assisted by colleagues); review of grading practices surveys and results from the 2005-2006 academic year, to situate these data in the program’s self-study goals properly; gathering and synthesizing all summaries and preliminary analyses of teaching materials and integrating those results into the findings of the grading practices surveys from the previous academic year; and finally, writing the “Teaching Practices Report,” which I submitted in late March of 2007 to the Review Committee.

University of California, Irvine

Contributing Editor for A Student Guide to Writing at UCI

During my years at UC Irvine, I was a contributing editor to the annual publication of A Student Guide to Writing at UCI on several occasions. My contributions ranged from crafting and co-editing an entire chapter (see Appendix M), working on committees that select model essays for publication in the following year’s guide, to writing head-notes for various papers and chapters throughout the text.

Appendix M contains a chapter on “Peer Review,” which I wrote and co-edited with a former colleague, Vicki Russell, for the Second Edition of the guide, published in 1994.

Placement Test Reader for Educational Testing Services (ETS)

The Entry Level Writing Requirement Placement Test is a two-hour essay exam administered by the ETS Western Field Office in Concord, CA, for the University of California system. The satisfaction of this requirement is a prerequisite for enrollment in many UC courses that require substantial writing, including courses in freshman composition. ETS typically administers this exam to incoming students throughout California on the second Saturday in May.

To grade thousands of essays consistently and efficiently, ETS invites various composition specialists, including outstanding graduate students and university-level composition instructors, to participate in an ambitious weekend of norming and grading in Northern California every spring. It has been my privilege to have been invited regularly and served twice in this vital process for the University of California system.

GRE Instructor for Kaplan, Inc.

In addition to my career in composition studies, I am also a certified Graduate Record Examination (GRE) instructor and tutor for Kaplan, the oldest and most successful test preparation company in the United States. My teaching responsibilities at Kaplan have included one-on-one tutoring and teaching 8-week courses that prepare prospective graduate students to excel in all three sections of the GRE:  Analytical, Verbal, and Written Assessment. During these sessions, Kaplan instructors train students in a myriad of strategies for accurately handling topics such as:

  • Analytical Writing
  • Verbal: Sentence Completions; Analogies; Critical Reading; Antonyms; Reading Comprehension; Vocabulary Building
  • Quantitative: Word Problems; Quantitative Comparisons; Data Interpretation; Arithmetic; Proportions/Geometry; Algebra; Number Properties
  • Stress Management
  • Computer Adaptive Test (CAT) Mastery

Despite the apparent differences between my teaching responsibilities in a composition classroom and those in the context of a GRE prep course, I firmly believe that my teaching for Kaplan has positively influenced my teaching practices in my composition courses and vice versa. My decades of expertise with composition mastery make me uniquely qualified to provide a high quality of instruction to Kaplan students who are particularly anxious about the extensive writing component and verbal sections of the GRE. I have also been invited to score practice written tests for Kaplan (GRE, SAT, LSAT, and MCAT) because of my prior involvement with ETS through the Entry Level Writing Requirement Placement Test for the University of California. In this way, I provide a unique level of feedback to students during their preparation for the written apparatus of their respective exams.

Kaplan’s Teacher Development Program is a rigorous curriculum that prospective instructors must pass before final hiring. There is a heavy emphasis placed on the core elements of Kaplan’s test-taking methodologies and equally on best teaching practices. They set a high value on coaching their instructors to 1) carry themselves with grace and confidence, 2) conduct engaging and highly interactive class sessions, 3) provide genuine support and mentoring to their students, and 4) personify the high quality of customer service upon which Kaplan’s reputation is based. Many of these essential practices carry over to my work in the composition classroom. It reminds me never to lose sight of the basic details of excellent teaching: appropriate body language, effective board work, a steady teaching pace, an inspiring and authentic level of energy, and a real-time sensitivity to how students respond to a lesson. Although these elements represent only a fraction of what contributes to overall teaching excellence, they are valuable tools for a solid foundation in successfully communicating knowledge in the classroom.