Effective teaching focuses on problem solving rather than on prescriptive solutions. It means teaching students the useful kinds of questions to ask about their writing and the most productive ways to accomplish with their writing the aims that are most important and valuable to them. As a teacher, I work to introduce students to the importance of writing in the work of the university and to help them develop their critical reading, thinking and writing skills so that they can successfully participate in that work.

Writing is intellectual work, and students need to learn how to synthesize and analyze multiple points of view; how to articulate and support their own position(s) regarding various issues; and how to adjust their writing to multiple audiences, purposes, and conventions. Students in my courses are expected to engage the ideas encountered in academic and serious public discourse, to develop complex ideas and arguments through consideration of different perspectives, and to connect their life experiences with ideas and information they encounter in classes. In this enterprise, social constructivist, feminist, and liberatory pedagogies guide my work. With their emphasis on collaboration and the social construction of knowledge, these pedagogies call into question the idea of any one interpretation or reading of the world; they decentralize authority in the classroom; and they talk about the ways cultures construct knowledge, history, values, and ideals. In my courses I ask students to examine the social nature of language by collaborating on group projects, meeting in reading and writing groups, and becoming active investigators of the uses of language in their communities.

I am most effective as a teacher, I think, when I help students become their own best critics, when I share with them my own joy in language, and when I assist them in understanding how to explore the complexities of a particular issue or concern. My role is not to provide students with knowledge; instead I see my job as moving beyond the transmission of facts and skills to encouraging students to try on new ways of thinking, talking, and writing. To this end, my courses encourage students to see that writing is a way of thinking and that in the very act of writing about a particular subject for a particular audience, the writer will construct new knowledge; they seek to help students understand that writing is something they can learn to do; and they work to illustrate the ways in which writing and reading are interrelated by teaching students to read not only to cull information from texts, but also to observe writers at work and, in the process, to discover a range of strategies available to them.

Because my courses often stand as students' initiation into the discourses of the academic community, I believe certain classroom practices are crucial. I beleive my class meetings need to encourage active participation, and they need to expose students to the processes of critical thinking, reading, and writing and to the thoughtful and informed critique of these. I believe context is also central. Students need to see that culture in general, and texts in particular, are constructed and shaped by people and by various voices in competition and conversation. This active shaping is central to the way we understand writing and its place in the world.

Writing is an epistemic activity that serves to develop, focus, and refine thinking as well as allow students to communicate effectively. I also like to introduce students to wildly clashing assumptions and methods of investigation, and to demonstrate the ways in which informal talk is theorizing--personal experience and language can constitute an alternative form of academic discourse. This helps me deal with the problem of students reproducing--summarizing--rather than interrogating texts. I want students to see that all they do—every act—is an interpretive act. Shaping my courses around Robert Scholes' curriculum of textual studies enables me to demonstrate the interrelations of reading and writing--that we read and write, analyze and construct our world as well as our texts, and that we are read and written by them.I often use group work to meet these objectives. I've found when students participate actively in group work they often develop a better understanding of course material, and they usually retain that understanding longer than they would when studying individually; they also engage in and explore the language practices I want them to interrogate. Further, groups often take unexpected exploratory turns in their learning activities, asking questions and synthesizing information in original and productive ways.

Until writers talk with others, until they engage in conversations about writing and reading, they can't know if their work communicates what they desire; they can'’t have their ideas validated by others; they can't encounter alternative perspectives. I want students to feel that our classroom is the ideal environment for testing new concepts and advocating new points of view. I like to help students focus on framing arguments and engaging in conversations in which they seek to persuade others to see things their way. To do so, students need to understand the ways they use language to construct their own arguments. Helping students gain access to rhetorical practices begins a process of sharing and making knowledge within the classroom.