Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

March 2026

My teaching begins from a simple premise: writing, speaking, and communication is real. While it's rhetorical, situated, multimodal, we are always oriented toward real audiences rather than the imaginary. We are always writing for a very real someone, somewhere with a somewhy. 

In our classes, students don’t just write things like hypothetical reports; we're designing artifacts, testing for usability with people, revise for accessibility, and articulating rhetorical decisions for specific users. Real is there, all the time. 

This means we’re treating technical writing, and writing in general, as a recursive process, rather than a static process. Every major assignment involves reflection, redesign, and user feedback. We're learning that things like clarity, concision, completeness, and correctness are not universal. In fact, they shift across cultures, disciplines, interfaces, and platforms.

Take for example, in an intercultural email assignment for upper-division engineering students: students analyzed scientific communication breakdowns and discovered that politeness conventions, time expectations, and epistemological norms were genre-defining, not decorative. What was "correct" in Korea was "incorrect" in Scotland. Context and, most importantly, people matter. 

This is also an example of how we build out a classroom to be an applied design space, not simply a writing space to do work. When we’re together, students experiment with ideas and data they’ve collected. They’re working to practice storytelling, multimodal documentation, and procedural communication in the projects they’re working on. They articulate what changes when an infographic replaces a paragraph, or when a prototype demo replaces a memo. These decisions matter because in science and technology classes in particular, communication is not always descriptive; sometimes, it is deeply operational. It is real. 

As a professor, I want students to carry forward a sense of responsibility. It is my hope they understand that writing directs action, not just comprehension. When communication is ethical, multimodal, and audience-situated, students become not just communicators but stewards of scientific meaning and access. It stays real.