My first semester teaching was at Northern Michigan University (NMU) in Marquette, MI, where I am currently a graduate teaching assistant. The university is located in a rural area of the Upper Peninsula. During my first semester, I had twenty-three traditional freshmen who had attended public school. I taught in one of the dorm buildings that had a classroom. The classroom was equipped with rolling tables that sat students in groups of four. I also had two televisions to connect my laptop to, along with four whiteboards. *straight out of undergrad*
I taught English 111: College Composition I and was required to teach the following core principles: rhetoric, composing process, genre conventions, research, multimodality, oral expression, and reflection. Along with teaching EN111, I took EN509 a teaching colloquium with the rest of my cohort. In this course, we worked on our lesson plans and teaching strategies for the essays we were required to teach: a literacy narrative, persuasive, expository, and a final reflection. Other course requirements included two oral presentations and a multimodal project.
Out of all of the core principles for EN111, the hardest principle to teach was rhetoric. I did not feel confident enough to teach rhetoric to a group of students. I was unsure of how to approach this outcome, so I did what most of the other members in my cohort did. I had my students read an excerpt from the textbook Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing. I thought that would be the easiest way to introduce and explain rhetoric to my students. After reading the excerpt, my students told me that the format of the text (a graphic novel style textbook) slowed them down and made it more difficult to read, so they did not absorb the content.
I decided to search YouTube for videos that I could show to help explain rhetoric to them better than I could. I found a Ted Talk called “How to Use Rhetoric to Get What You Want” and the speaker was Camille A. Langston. I also showed my class a persuasive Ted-Ed video called “Schools Should Start Later for Teens” with Wendy Troxel that showed them how they could use rhetoric to write and to speak persuasively. I thought it was important to show them a persuasive speech because they were required to do one with their essay to meet the oral expression outcome. The videos helped my students understand what rhetoric is, so I started to incorporate commercials to analyze how the advertisers used rhetoric. After doing this exercise, my students were confident moving forward with their persuasive essays.
Although my students and I were confident by the end of this unit, we had a difficult start. If my EN509 course had provided more resources and if I had more experience, I would have felt comfortable from the beginning. Instead, I did what everyone else in my cohort was doing to make it easier on myself, and it did not work well for my class. My students could also tell that I was unsure of the concept as I tried to teach them. I am teaching EN111 my second semester, and I have a completely different approach. I am using genre pedagogy theory to explore each of the essays. In doing so, I’ll give my students the tools they need to decode genre conventions. By understanding genre conventions, they will understand the rhetoric surrounding that genre. I am also using Monsters: A Bedford Spotlight Reader as their only text in this course. I will be able to pull examples of narrative, persuasion, and exposition from the textbook, and this will enable me teach the entire course from a genre perspective. My hope is that this will create a cohesive course.