Stephanie West-Puckett

A WRITING, RHETORIC, AND TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION

TEACHING MANIFESTO
Writing is Making
Gee Powell S hipka
A. Banks A . H a a s

Making is a
Humanistic
Endeavor
Prinns A r o l a a n d B a l l

As human beings, we are tool makers, and rhetoric is our primary tool. As a
culture-kit made up of semiotic materials to mix and remix, rhetoric enables
us to make making to think, learn, communicate, understand difference,
build-relationships, and make things happen in the world. My classroom is a
place where we engage rhetoric as a boundary-marking practice, both
interpreting and producing rhetorics through the manipulation of language,
images, sounds, objects and their combinations.

When we make, we dont just make objects and texts, we make our identities,
our relationships, our communities, and our discipline. Thus, my classroom is a

production-centered space where students explore the affordances and

Marback Grabill Wy s o c k i
constraints of different tools, technologies, and rhetorics. Learning, then, is
the natural by-product of critical making and reflection in community. As a
mentor, I make along side students, helping them to solve wicked design problems
and to develop their personal theories of writing and rhetoric.

Play and Failure

are Necessary

To break the Taylorist logics of factory production in the classroom, I

challenge students to engage the habits of mind for success in postsecondary
Henry Alexander and Rhodes writing, particularly curiosity and creativity, following lateral lines in
W. B ank s Johnson-Eilola and Selber composing and welcoming the detours and regressions that are central to
discovery and innovation. We tinker, play, and experiment as a means of
engaging the rapidly changing disciplinary, academic, workplace, social,
and institutional cultures that require flexibility, adaptability, and imaginative problem-solving. I privilege intention over outcome so students can take
risks and find joy and pleasure in the processes of writing and making.

Students and Teachers

Should Always Tool Up
Ridolfo and DeVoss P r i o r
C. Selfe D. Selfe

Every person can learn to write effectively in a maker-centered ecology that

includes high quality tools and high quality support for using those tools. My
classroom provides space for students to experiment with a variety of digital
and analogue composing tools while fostering a design approach to writing
and making. During class, students are prototyping, alpha and beta testing,
iterating, and circulating their compositions, considering the material impacts
and rhetorical velocities of their artifacts. During this process, I nudge
students to move beyond their comfort zones, encourage them to struggle
with dissonance and complexity, and support them in developing writing and
learning networks that thread in and out of the classroom.

Do it Together to Create I reject out-of-the-box solutions for the difficult work of teaching and
Thirdspaces for Composition assessing students because learning is not a commodity and theres no

Nickoson L o n g o H urley one-size-fits-all pedagogy. As such, I am passionately engaged in building

Warner J. B . S c o t t Brannon et al. and tinkering with classroom practice, testing my pedagogies through

ongoing action research projects that look at the specificities of impact on

particular student groups. I take pride in designing my own course
architectures and assessments and engaging students in participatory design
to flatten traditional classroom hierarchies. Borrowing from the maker movement, I am better able to construct a thirdspace that blends amateur and
expert knowledges, public and counterpublic appeals, academic and
non-academic writing, and discursive and object-oriented making practices.
My goal is not simply to help students engineer more successful texts, but to
support them in composing more participatory, just, and equitable futures.