I come to the field of rhetoric and composition through my experiences working as a undergraduate and graduate writing center consultant. My experience working one-on-one with students who are at extremely different experience and comfort levels with writing has helped me realize that I value student agency, collaboration, and critical reflection.

My time as both a student and writing center consultant has taught me that most students view school as a place where the teacher holds all the right answers. For them then, school becomes a place where their own agency, as people with knowledge and skills, is downplayed and instead they work their hardest to give the teacher what he or she wants. But, as Freire (1970) has shown this authoritative teacher who makes knowledge deposits into the passive students only oppresses them by disengaging their critical thinking skills. That is, students become dependent on people with authority telling them how to act, who to be, and what to think. Instead, I believe education should be about helping students to act and think for themselves.

Therefore, I envision myself as less of a teacher, but more as a collaborator. My job as a collaborator is to help students ask and develop questions about the world that matter to them, and then aid in the process of finding answers to those questions. Many times in writing consultations, I am not familiar with the content of the paper and therefore, do not have all the answers to questions that students ask. Instead, I ask the student questions in order to get them actively think about what they want to communicate to their audience. By asking questions, I encourage the student to develop agency in their writing and thinking. I become a thinking partner or collaborator that helps the student tease out the answers to their own questions. For example, if a student asks me whether or not a sentence sounds ok as it is written, I’ll usually give them my opinion, but emphasize that the sentence is only ‘good’ if it communicates what they wanted it too as clearly as possible.

Another way I hope to promote student agency in the writing classroom is by having them critically reflect and interrogate their place in the world through both informal and formal writing assignments. One way that I teach students to engage critically and reflectively is through the daybook. More than a writing journal, a daybook serves as a catchall for any and every thought, and a place for students to practice expressing their thoughts in writing (Brannon et al., 2008). In the writing classroom, the daybook can be a place to take notes about lessons, respond to prompts, reflect on the writing process, and critically think about social issues that affect them. By having students use their daybooks consistently throughout class, they will develop an archive of their thinking that they can then draw upon when it comes time to choose a topic that interests them.

The idea of allowing students to bring their interests into the classroom, whether they be video games and television shows or heavier issues such as homelessness and racism, is of extreme importance to my philosophy as a teacher. As a writing teacher, I want to collaborate with and get students to reflect upon issues that they face or that they feel are important. By allowing the lived curriculum of students (Yancey, 2002)  to enter the classroom, I hope that they will learn how writing can empower them to think, communicate, and enact change around the issues that matter to them.