My philosophy in teaching is that learning requires a balance of theory and practice and that students should take an active role in discovering and applying knowledge through exploring the institutions, ideologies, and practices that inform their learning, as well as their own learning processes. As a result, my emphasis in teaching undergraduate writing focuses on the literate practices involved in acts of written communication. For ENG 101, ENG 102, ENG 215, ENG 301(all courses I have taught at ASU) the underlying basis for the courses assumes that writing is rhetorical and addresses the dynamic interactions between writer, reader, text and context. In order for students to learn to write well, it is necessary for them to begin to examine some of the situations or genres in which written communication occurs, examine their own assumptions that they bring to these situations as readers and writers, identify strategies that will allow them to gain more control over their own writing, and gain awareness of the various media and contexts in which they write that affect and shape literate practices. To meet these philosophical goals, my teaching draws from a model of multiliteracy pedagogy designed by the New London Group as follows:

Situated Practice
Immersion in experience and the utilization of available Designs of meaning, including those from student's lifeworlds and simulations of the relationships to be found in workplaces and public spaces
Overt Instruction
Systematic, analytic, and conscious understanding of Designs of meaning and Design processes. In the case of Multiliteracies, this requires the introduction of explicit metalanguages, which describe and interpret the Design elements of different modes of meaning
Critical Framing
Interpreting the social and cultural context of particular Designs of meaning. This involves the students' standing back from what they are studying and viewing it critically in relation to its context
Transformed Practice
Transfer in meaning-making practice, which puts the transformed meaning (the Redesigned) to work in other contexts or cultural sites

(The New London Group. (2000). A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. In Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis (Eds.), Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York: Routledge.)

I follow the same Philosophy of Teaching for graduate instruction but with a greater emphasis on building a strong foundation of knowledge (i.e. the literature) of the theoretical landscape that informs, and is informed by, studies in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Studies.

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