Maria Novotny, Ph.D.

| Teaching Philosophy

As a community-engaged scholar whose work centers on issues of reproductive loss and infertility, I am
acutely aware of how discourses, technologies, and cultural norms allow for particular bodies, and their
embodied orientations, to be made more visible over others. Living in an infertile body, I am exposed daily to
how these discourses and technologies reinforce a normative narrative about bodies. I incorporate this
awareness into my teaching practices by creating a classroom culture that welcomes diverse embodied
experiences. Drawing on the intersections of my scholarship, which is informed through decolonial and
feminist perspectives, I help students critically interrogate their own bodily relationships with language,
norms, and technologies. Whether teaching courses in Rhetoric and Composition or Technical
Communication, my embodied pedagogy is informed by my commitment to encourage students to not only
become critics of discourses and technologies that regulate norms but persons engaged in designing ethical
responses to injustices.

I enact my commitment to embodied learning through three cornerstone statements.

I approach my teaching as a pedagogical curator.

While curation is traditionally understood in the context of exhibitions, I view curation as a pedagogical
practice. Curators of exhibitions make decisions about what is shown, how pieces are displayed, where the
pieces reside, when to debut the work, and the interactivity amongst participants. In sum, curation is a
relational, ethical, and rhetorical series of practices that creates meaningful encounters. It makes knowledge-
making accessible and engaging through a systemic series of experiences.

I apply this understanding of curation to my own instruction when teaching students about writing, rhetoric,
and technology. I view it as my task to be selective with the types of texts, modalities, and the content that
students engage with. These texts are also strategically scaffolded to ensure high-impact when students
interact with such texts and content. For example, in my course “Digital Rhetorics in Health and Medicine”
and elaborated upon in my co-written article “Teaching a Critical Digital Literacy of Wearables,” I note the
pedagogical shifts I needed to make as I transitioned from teaching in a department with a Professional
Writing major to a new institution with a department consisting of primarily English literature majors. Each
set of students had different exposures and knowledges of digital rhetoric. Curating an experience about
digital rhetoric at this new institution required that I become self-reflexive of my own assumptions of what
concepts, terms, and content students needed interaction with in order to succeed in the course. As such, I
made considerable effort to take addition time and attention to unpacking definitions, theories and methods
of digital rhetoric before moving into an intersectional approach that included health, medicine, and
wearables. This example illustrates a curatorial approach to pedagogy. It reflectively attends and aims to
predict who participants may be, their prior knowledge, and the additional instruction that the pedagogical
curator must evoke. In short, a pedagogical curator is self-reflexive, ethical, and innovative.

I bridge classroom learning with collaborative community partnerships.

I see the writing, rhetoric, and technology classroom as a metaphorical incubator. As a pedagogical curator, I
aim to create a classroom space where students can experiment with a variety of tools and content to address
problems they have identified in the course. Addressing such problems requires application of knowledge.
Students apply knowledge gained in my courses by collaborating with university organizations and local
communities. By valuing the learning that occurs through classroom-community partnerships, a safe space is
created where mistakes and failure can be learned from and revised. Such a practice, I believe is integral to
preparing students as ethical and consciously engaged public citizens.

For example, in my “Grant Writing Foundations” course, I worked with university outreach organizations to
identify and invite local Oshkosh community non-profits to collaborate with my class. Five community
organizations agreed and presented a series of problems their organization faced, which limited their outreach
in the community. Students worked in groups to write need statements for their assigned organization. These
 Maria Novotny, Ph.D. | Teaching Philosophy

need statements informed student’s research on prospective grants their organization would be applicable for
consideration. Upon identifying a series of grants, student groups collaboratively presented their research
along with a series of recommendations to the community partner. The community organizations and
students negotiated a plan of action which informed which grants students wrote proposals for.

While students learned and gained experience researching and writing grant documents, this collaborative
partnership revealed the learning of an often underrecognized skill: reciprocity. As the course concluded,
students remarked the interpersonal and rhetorical negotiations they had to make in order to successfully
partner with the organization. They learned that working with and representing other bodies is hard, it is
embodied. Students had the skills to write a grant, but it was the unpredicted time and negotiations
collaborative engagement with the community partner took that revealed real moments of learning to shift
knowledge in the classroom to knowledge enacted in the surrounding community. This experiential,
embodied learning about writing is an outcome I strive to achieve whenever I teach.

I design classroom experiences that allow for self-reflexivity.

The examples shared above emphasize that my teaching values embodied learning. Yet, measuring embodied
learning as an outcome can be difficult for students to descriptively document and instructors to assess. To
address this difficulty, I rely upon Halbritter and Lindquist’s concept of “preflection.” Their concept
pedagogically designs activities for students to predict moments of learning. In action, students “preflect” by
creating a series of predictions about a particular assignment or course experience. This “preflection,” acts as
a data set which students later return to, upon completing the assignment or experience, to ground their
claims in evidence. In operation, “preflection” allows moments of failure to occur so long as students speak
back to what was learned from such shortcomings.

I frequently apply this concept in all of my courses. Specifically, I find it useful for teaching students research
as a process and not a series of formulaic actions. For example, in my “Advanced Writing” course students
must create a brief research proposal which outlines a question of inquiry, their proposed methods to address
such a question, a brief rationale justifying why this question is relevant, and three sources that they believe
will be useful to addressing the question. Students then begin the research and create an annotated
bibliography. After completing the research students return to their research proposal and create a narrative
that reflects on what actually happened when they began the research and discusses what they would now
revise given the results of their research. In this way, the research proposal acts as a “preflection” seeking to
predict how students will engage in the research process. As the instructor, I weigh the research narrative
more heavily than the actual annotated bibliography — intentionally rewarding students to reflect about what
did not go well rather than what did go well. This is how I give value to student learning and make space for
self-reflexivity in the classroom. I seek in these moments to teach students that research is a process and takes
time. There is a methodology to engaging in research. Such frequently is a hard lesson for students,
particularly undergraduates, to learn. Yet, once they engage in embodied activity of research, they quickly
speak in their reflective narrative to the moments in which they have come to learn research is hard.

***

These three cornerstone statements define my approach to an embodied pedagogy. I draw upon my own
embodied knowledges to curate classroom learning that invites students to interrogate their own relationships
between other bodies, other discourses, other knowledges, and other technologies. Doing so, I seek to shift
assumptions that the classroom is a space to passively retain knowledge. Rather, I seek to create a culture of
learning that engages students as socially-engaged actors. I see myself a facilitator of this both in the
classroom as an instructor as well as a mentor to undergraduate and graduate students working on research
projects. I believe that these statements assist in repositioning higher education beyond a place for
disseminating knowledge but as a place that encourages students to transform ideas into action.