Rhetoric History and Theory | Research Colloquium
The third course I took in the fall was 885. This research colloquium was certainly the most practical course of the semester, and one that helped me determine my area of emphasis and understand my place in the field in important ways. One project was our Self-Study Project, which helped me learn how to handle the load I was carrying: as a result of this self study, I asked for a desk for Christmas so I could quit doing all my work on my bed, which has helped immensely: it's much easier to stay awake. This may not seem particularly important, but considering the pressure I am under this year, anything that makes my life easier is very important. Too, I found that I rather enjoy playing round with this kind of empirical data and seeing what can be learned from it. Another project was a "ReadAround"--a sort of research project that results in metacommentary about what we read. My second "ReadAround", "Pedagogy for the Perplexed" was about the ways of teaching writing, as mentioned above, in creative writing contexts versus composition contexts and how others saw the difference. Turns out I was not the only one approaching this very differently. But if writing--all writing--is an art, the art of rhetoric, then why is composition not taught as such? At this point I don't have answers, but it gave me even more ways of thinking about what I wanted to do with my dissertation and why I taught writing the ways I did.
The most significant project in this course, however, was the Shadowing Project, which helped me understand myself, gave me serious insight into what I wanted to focus on in my PhD, and actually resulted in some interesting events and changes in our English Department at Alma College. After meeting with both department chairs from CMU and Alma, the English faculty at Alma had a department meeting and discussed hiring a rhetoric and writing professor with expertise in digital and professional writing rather than hiring another literature professor, a position they have been trying to fill for two years. This may very well be the beginning of a new English area of concentration at Alma--which they need very badly. This meant several things as far as my PhD is concerned as well. For one, I have taught at both a small college and a larger university, and I am positive that the small college is where I d like to be, for various reasons I won't go into here. As I worked on my coursework at MSU, I began to understand the field of rhetoric and writing in ways I never had before, mostly in terms of the various possibilities, the wide scope of the field, and especially the importance of digital rhetorics. This wasn't something that happened in a moment of eureka, but rather as a gradual filling-in of some of the blanks that I had in my understanding of the field. As I began to realize this, I also realized that the small liberal arts schools where I so badly want to teach, as a general rule, offer little to none of these writing opportunities to undergraduates. The eureka came when I realized that if I wanted to teach at a school like this, I would be destined to teach basic writing and freshman composition for the rest of my career--unless things changed. So I decided that I need to do one of two things in my future: work at a school that does have more than basic composition or work at a school that is willing and eager to change. In order to do either one--teach all kinds of writing and/or design a writing program--I need to see myself as capable of teaching any writing course a small college would possibly offer, everything from freshman comp to digital writing and creative writing. Considering that my master's work focused in creative nonfiction, I felt that I was already proficient in this area and needed to drop my desire to pursue it any further during my PhD work, since this was my original thought. What I needed was more expertise in digital rhetorics, so I have now determined that my PhD area of emphasis needs to be in digital rhetorics. It wasn't really the direction I saw myself headed when I first came to MSU, but the course of events as described above led me to believe that this is exactly what I want to do. This also has given me an idea of the direction I'd like to go with my dissertation, and that is some sort of research in the area of writing programs, goals, or possibilities in small liberal arts colleges. Although I don't know exactly what this would look like, I feel confident that in the next year or so, as I do my coursework, the project will become more clear.