Steven Dawson

Teaching Philosophy
Department of English 1114 Ferry St #7
Purdue University Lafayette, IN 47901
500 Oval Drive (720) 979-6854
West Lafayette, IN 47907 dawson43@purdue.edu

After moving to Colorado from East Los Angeles, I was quick to realize that the exclusive code of
my home and neighborhood was not the required language at school. This was a problem when
I moved to Colorado; my mixing of English and Spanish and the non-academic styles of
argument employed by my family and friends rarely won me praise in the classrooms of my
youth. But it did teach me that language mattered and that the ability to write effectively often
meant the difference between a life of hard physical labor and one of, what I decided then, was
freedom.

It is this sense of freedom through writing that I attempt to transfer to my students. I strive to
create lessons that empower students, offering them a new lens towards rhetoric and writing.
At the beginning of every semester, I bring in familiar artifacts into this unfamiliar and often
intimidating space. I welcome song lyrics, pop culture memes, GIFs, and while these artifacts
are not intended to push my students towards models of successful academic writing, they are
artifacts of rhetoric—and I believe they’re valuable, even precious, because of that. Marx said,
“I was listening to the cries of the past, when I should have been listening to the cries of the
future.” I want to hear my students and engage in the world of rhetoric that they are growing
up and interacting in, acknowledging that rhetoric exists everywhere and challenging the idea
of an academic text.

I construct assignments for my composition classroom that connect aesthetics, technology, and
critical engagement to my students’ academic pursuits. In my English 106 class, for instance, I
teach my students how to effectively use InDesign to create a presentation of their research
that is both professionally and aesthetically effective. Presenting their arguments using
InDesign allows the students to explore modes of visual rhetoric – such as constructing
relationships through transitions and spacing – while at the same time fostering dialectical
discussion in the classroom. The presentations, then, function as a visual representation from
which they can examine and conceptualize their written arguments.

The most important part of this sustained empowerment resides, already, within the students
themselves: their voice. Historically, students have been conditioned to believe their voice
doesn’t matter within the academic space, and it is my job to point them towards language as
an outlet used to circumnavigate that. It is my hope that, if nothing else, the courses that I
teach push students toward a similar sort of awareness about language, about their own lives,
and about the potentially crucial intersection of the two.