Several things contributed to the success of “Academic Writing: Rhetorics of Place,” the course for which I am being recognized. First and foremost is the group of smart, motivated students with whom it was my pleasure to work. They are the kind of students that make it look easy to be a good teacher.
With students like these, one of the most important imperatives is to create a course structure that offers the freedom for them to develop lines of inquiry to which they feel a high degree of commitment. My course provided the theories and the methodologies for students to investigate the dynamics of a particular place of their choosing. Their reading, writing, and research built upon and, I hope, complicated and challenged the knowledge they brought to the classroom.
At the same time, I believe a well-designed course — especially one for first-year students — must call on students to develop new understandings of the world and new tactics for representing it. While my course drew on their existing knowledge and experience, it called for multiple approaches to that knowledge and to the way they wrote about it (indeed, I argue that those two things are mutually constitutive). Each new assignment in the course required revision and reconfiguration of their earlier writing, demanding that they re-examine and often abandon positions they took that were no longer
tenable. In the case of writing about place, especially places of personal significance like hometowns, the temptation is typically towards nostalgia. But the sustained and recursive nature of the investigations students undertook helped them see the conflicts and problems that connect the places they studied to larger patterns of culture, politics, and history.
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The combination of intellectual freedom with a structure that enabled them to construct new ideas about familiar places, and to represent that knowledge in new ways, helped give the seminars as a whole a strong sense of validity as sites of real academic inquiry. It helped that I was pushed to learn alongside my students: in order for me to direct their projects, they had to teach me about the places they were examining as I had to teach them new methodologies for examining them. We could legitimately claim at the end of the course that no one had ever done exactly this kind of intellectual work before.
Finally, I must acknowledge the role of the Mellon Fellows program in the creation of this course. It’s been my very good fortune to work with a group of colleagues who enthusiastically make teaching an integral, generative part of their professional and intellectual lives.
Douglas Reichert Powell, a Mellon Fellow in the Center for Teaching, Learning and Writing, is winner of the Award for Excellence in Teaching Writing.
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