Jacob Stewart

Teaching Philosophy
As a writing instructor, I believe that students must understand meaning as socially
constructed through various forms of communication. In my classroom, students learn to assess
discourse communities and obtain tools for discovering what constitutes acceptable
communication as they enter new disciplines or writing arenas. In composition courses, I
encourage first-year students to value their past writing experience, leading them to interrogate
and often challenge their preconceptions about writing. For freshman students, building of
confidence and constructing an authoritative writing identity begins with an understanding of
themselves as writers with important previous knowledge that can be reconstructed for college
disciplinary environments. As an instructor of upper-division courses, I encourage students to
refine their authoritative positons developed in their FYC classes in order to become contributive
writers in scholastic, professional, and civic contexts. This requires that they learn to produce
writing that effects change in their chosen communities by interrogating the numerous variables
that influence the production of persuasive discourse. One of the most important of these
variables includes their choice of writing technology, as they learn to understand how alternative
modalities impact different audiences and have different rhetorical effects.
Toward these ends, I ask students to consider how audiences will impact their writing,
and I teach them how to write with authority while operating within the rules of varying
communities. In order to achieve these goals, my teaching philosophy relies on three
foundational principles. First, that writing is necessarily collaborative and that collaboration
between co-learners leads to more successful conceptual understanding and prose. Second, that
transfer of writing skills across disciplines is best facilitated when students reflect on the writing
activities that they are assigned. And third, that attaining transferable writing skills is not
necessarily reflected by a flawless product, but by understanding how to develop useful inquiries
in specific contexts.
Collaboration is a necessity of writing. James Porter argues that writing is intertextual; no
piece of prose is composed in a vacuum but will be influenced by other texts which an author
draws upon, either consciously or subconsciously. In order for students to see the value of
intertextual influence on their writing, I foreground collaborative practice in my classrooms in
which I attempt to position myself as a more experienced co-learner. In my classroom, group and
partner activities, peer review, and conferencing on assignments are normal occurrences. We
discuss new ideas as a class, challenge each other to clarify thoughts and prose when working
with partners, and apply concepts to hypothetical and real-world situations by collaborating in
small groups and sharing findings with the entire class. By showing students that interaction with
their peers and me as co-learners leads to successful prose and knowledge building, I hope to
undermine the farcical image of the genius writer isolated in a room. Once students are metacognitively aware of the positive impact of peer collaboration, my desire is that they will transfer
this understanding to scholarly conversations. Students come to see themselves as one voice
among several scholars working together to answer complex disciplinary inquiries.
While many instructors use collaborative techniques, positioning myself as a co-learner
enables students to feel comfortable approaching me with inquiries that have potential for real
impact in ways that standard collaborative techniques might not achieve. For example, in a
recent section of Composition II, a student approached me to discuss her preliminary interests in
digital literacies and meaning-making with new media. At that early point in the semester, the

student had very broad interests and many excellent ideas. At our initial meeting, it would have
been very easy for me to dictate her research, to lay out a clear path for her to follow in order to
write a good paper that would help her pass the course. Instead, I asked her to tell me about her
interests, and I took notes as she discussed many varying research avenues and ideas she had
about digital literacies. After she outlined her initial thoughts, we were able to discuss some of
her ideas, and we eventually worked together to design a useful research project investigating the
impact of the University of Central Florida library interface on students meaning-making
activities. This project developed out of her personal experience with navigating digital
environments. By positioning myself as listener and note-taker during that initial interaction, I
empowered her to develop useful inquiries initiated from her own thoughts that led to impactful
prose across multiple contexts (her project was published in Stylus: A Journal of First-Year
Writing, presented at the universitys annual Knights Write Showcase, and accepted as a poster
presentation at the national Conference on College Composition and Communication). As a
result of my position as a co-learner and support system, she took risks, trusting me to contribute
to her understanding rather than pass judgment on her as of yet incomplete ideas. Those risks
have paid clear dividends for herself, her peers, and the wider academic community.
In order that such academic rigor will occur when students move to their major
disciplines and other writing settings, I facilitate transfer of collaborative writing skills,
contextual understanding, and concepts by having my students reflect on both assignments and
in-class activities. In addition, each major writing assignment in my classroom is accompanied
by a reflection piece and/or activity, in which students are asked to answer specific questions
about their writing process and audience analysis. Since my ultimate goal is for students to use
what they learn in my writing classrooms in varying academic, professional, and civic contexts,
this approach assists students develop a meta-awareness of what occurs when they are faced with
new writing tasks. My goal as a writing instructor is not that students compose a perfect essay,
research paper, or multimodal project. It is that they reflect thoughtfully on their writing and are
prepared to analyze new writing tasks in various settings. There is evidence that this reflective
technique works well to facilitate transfer beyond my classroom. I had the pleasure of teaching a
wonderful Composition student in one of my earliest experiences as an instructor. Two years
later that student had become a scholar in her own right as a junior in the University of Central
Florida chemistry department. She came to my office and handed me a copy of a recently
published piece in the academic journal, Analytical Chemistry, for which she was the lead author.
In the footnotes of the piece, she published the following acknowledgment: S.T.M. would also
like to thank Jacob Stewart for preliminary advising in rhetoric.
Inherent in the stance that a pristine end product is not the focus of my course, is my
position that the processes of scholarly invention, discovery, and revision should be emphasized.
By concentrating on the process rather than the product, I empower students to take intellectual
risks in their writing; such risks lead students to discovery and invention of insightful
contributions to scholarly conversations. Because I emphasize revision and take a guiding rather
than evaluative stance on early drafts, students have time to thoroughly reflect on rhetorical
decisions and re-engineer their work so that it adequately fulfills contextual and audience
expectations. In my classes, students learn that mistakes in early drafts lead to innovation in later
drafts once they collaborate with their readers and are given time to invent new ideas.