Teaching Philosophy
& Student Projects

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  1. Student Projects
  2. Teaching Philosophy
  3. Teaching Feedback

Student Projects

So many students in my classes create awesome projects that I want to share. Here are a few, and please reshare widely!

Cornell University, College of Engineering

Campus Sustainability Projects

College of Engineering Projects

Job Application & Resources Projects

Software and Coding Projects

Project Management Guides

Virginia Tech, Professional & Technical Writing Program

  • Science Writing students collaboratively created a website highlighting the concepts and skills they felt other science communicators should know. I recoded this website using Bootstrap and GitHub to eradicate advertisements and include more of the students' design requests that couldn't be accomplished with WordPress (such as an accordion feature on the Spotlight Interviews page).
  • Science Writing students collaborated with Virginia Tech's Center for Communicating Science and the Fralin Life Science Institute to interview and write science stories about STEM graduate students who are white women and people of color.

Teaching Philosophy

My pedagogical axiom for learning is, “If we're not having fun, we're not doing it right.” This isn’t to say that my teaching style encourages a wanton free-for-all; rather, I mean to invoke what a former professor of mine called “serious fun.” If both students and instructor are engaged in a thoughtful mental exercise accompanied by the practice of reading, interacting with, and creating texts, the fun results from the nexus between these activities. I define text through a lens of semiotics as anything intended to communicate meaning, whether that text is written, visual, oral, or aural. It is in the interplay of intellect and praxis where I believe that the most effective and provocative learning occurs. Therefore, I am committed to scaffolding students’ critical thinking by designing curricula that combine theories and practices of rhetoric, writing, and technology to interrogate their existing notions of each.

infographic of my ENGL 3104: Professional Writing syllabus

As a teacher-scholar interested in the both technical communication and writing center studies, I value two shared pedagogies between these fields: collaboration and multiliteracies. First, a pedagogy of collaboration is based upon a theory of social cognition where humans learn by interacting, solving problems, and questioning what we know. Both the writing center and technical communication fields offer important contributions to how humans work together in ways mediated by texts. In writing centers, collaboration typically takes place between a writer and a tutor who negotiate meaning-making, but the writer ultimately retains ownership of the text. In technical communication, collaboration happens among many participants and authorship is often collective instead of individual. Exposing students to both kinds of collaboration prepares them to democratically produce texts, knowledge, and technologies. In my courses, students have worked collaboratively by conducting peer reviews on one another’s individual assignments and by collectively developing a website.

Second, I enact a pedagogy of multiliteracies by drawing upon a critical theory of technology. I understand multiliteracies to be predicated on the notion that technology is not merely a benign tool, but one imbued with human intentions and values that prompt rhetorical production. Accordingly, in my courses, students use technology to access texts, critique their own and others’ use of technologies and texts, and finally create texts with a rhetorical understanding of technology. For example, in my Science Writing course, students read science stories from online publications, examined the stories for written and visual rhetorical techniques, and then wrote their own stories with online publication in mind. Each student’s story is available on the website of the Virginia Tech Center for Communicating Science.

I treat writing as beginnings to knowledge-making. Enacting functional, critical, and rhetorical literacies is a beginning, a threshold event (Carter), which poises students to treat technology differently than they have previously. For instance, many of my students use the internet and social media, but when I assign an infographic or an instructional GIF project to exercise students’ knowledge of multiliteracies, I find that they are using various software or digital interfaces for the first time. Once they wrestle with technology to produce a digital text, they begin to understand how an interface’s affordances and drawbacks affect their digital design. That process of discovering how to use various software applications for textual construction and information design is generative for my students, and it encourages them to apply their newfound skills in other knowledge-making endeavors. After analyzing my syllabus infographic, students in my Professional Writing course then decided to employ the same genre for another assignment in which they needed to present a summary of the previous class period.

I view rhetoric as situational and accordingly challenge students to use what they learn from course readings and activities to determine the most appropriate medium for fashioning and delivering a text. In my Professional Writing course, one student chose to design a poster because her intended audience was elementary school children and she envisioned it hanging in their classroom. Through this practice, my students learn to regard rhetoric as situational: the medium that works for one audience does not work as well for another because their situations differ. Another student in the same class created a website intended to reach middle schoolers, who she reasoned were more likely to access the internet when looking for ways to counteract bullying. By pressing students to map out their exigence, audience, and constraints in assignments exercising multiliteracies, my goal is to equip them to respond critically and rhetorically in future situations where making texts is exigent.

References

Carter, M. (2003). Where Writing Begins: A Postmodern Reconstruction. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.
Selber, S. A. (2004). Multiliteracies for a Digital Age. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Teaching Feedback

Professional Writing Student, Virginia Tech

"Professor Hutchison was by far one of the most inspiring instructors I've had in my experience here at Virginia Tech. Her engagement and belief in all of her students combined with her honesty and humor made me as a student excited about my life and invested in the course material. Her enthusiasm for our work and course concepts meant something different to all of us, and there was much meaning from this course to be felt, taken, and interpreted."

Science Writing Student, Virginia Tech

"Mrs. Hutchison was an incredible teacher. Many instructors try, but fail, to incorporate class discussions, projects, and other non-traditional teaching methods in place of simple lectures. Mrs. H was able to make all of those methods work because she designed the course conscientiously and encouraged each student to think and contribute. Throughout the class, she incorporated reflection on how our discussions connected to bigger principles in science writing. Group projects, which can be a drag in other courses, were lively and produced excellent deliverables. This course went beyond how to be a science writer; it asked important questions about science, rhetoric, and communication."

Materials Science & Engineering Professional Development Student, Virginia Tech

“She really made the class feel less like a class by encouraging us to always share our thoughts and ask questions. In addition the feedback she gives on class projects is very thorough and helps me improve as a student."

Basic Writing Student, Montgomery College

“I am obliged to Professor Martin [my maiden name] for her remarkable teaching skills. She has not only been a huge guidance in my writings but a wonderful professor.”