I’m a Connecticut Yankee who’s headed west in pursuit of fame and fortune—or at the very least, my doctorate. I’ve been a model, a fry cook, an engraver, a docent, a graphic designer, and a professor—and I’ve relished learning from each experience.  I’m excited to return to the classroom as a student. My primary professional interests include multimodal composition, intellectual property, and liberation pedagogy.

Although my graduate work reflects a concentration in British and medieval literature, for the past several years I have focused my teaching and scholarship on composition, rhetoric, new media, and technical communication. Though it may seem that my interests lie nearly a millennium apart, I find parallels in regards to information access, literacy, and empowerment. Whether it be wikis and Wycliffe or blogs and Abelard, I hear echoes of the same hopes and fears—considerations of the immense power of publication (literally, making public), and the awesome responsibility such a power entails. The “digital divide” is not simply about access to technology but involves a critical understanding of how one should use technology to achieve one’s rhetorical goals. Although twenty-first century students are often characterized as computer whizzes, the machine (to riff off Michael Wesch) is using them. They know how to do basic word processing tasks, but many have neither the technical nor the critical thinking skills to create powerful multimodal texts that effectively communicate their intended message. My goal for graduate study is to discover and further develop the tools to guide my students to bridge this disempowering divide.

My research interests have been heavily influenced by Paulo Freire’s liberation pedagogy. For example, for my 2009 presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (“Open Source Your Course: A Guide to Using Open Source, Portable Learning Space in the Classroom”), I approached the use of portable applications from both a practical and a pedagogical standpoint. I argued that portable open source software offers powerful opportunities to a range of writers—those with disabilities, those who are economically disadvantaged, non-native speakers, and those who, for a range of reasons, have yet to find or assert their voice and therefore their identities. My 2008 Computers and Writing presentation, “Freire in the Twenty-First Century: Open Source As Pedagogy,” explored the impact of opening the “source code” of a course (thereby inviting revision and re-envisionment) as a means to engage and empower both students and teachers in their educational process.

I want to stress my passion for teaching writing and my interest in pedagogical research. In my classes, I employ a variety of communication and composition strategies to teach an awareness of rhetorical situations inside and outside of the university. Our students’ awareness of texts is changing, but more importantly, the prospective audiences for our students are changing. Effective communicators need to be able to critically analyze and create a variety of media. Through projects that range from proposals and reports to video essays and web portfolios, I aim to rhetorically guide my students to recognize the influence and impact of others’ text and stylistic choices, and thereby better anticipate and shape the implications of and responses to their own compositions. I firmly maintain that learning is not merely the quest for knowledge, but it helps each of us to fulfill our responsibility of respecting and caring for each other and our planet.