My name is Jessie Caitlin Bullard, and I have an M.A. in English with an emphasis in rhetoric and composition from CSU, Long Beach. I hold a Bachelor's degree with an emphasis in creative writing from UC Irvine, where I completed an undergraduate thesis comprising of an original poetry collection called Apparitions of You and Me. After graduating from UCI, I have continued my career in education and writing through my passions of teaching composition and creative writing. As I complete my Master's program at CSULB, I am currently producing a Master's thesis about Professor emeritus Peter Elbow's body of work with voice and its contemporary network with Professor Gregory Ulmer's theory of electracy.
In addition to my research interests of evolving composition pedagogies and digital rhetorics, I am a video game enthusiast, amateur crocheter, and animal-lover. I also participate in many community writing spaces within Southern California and publish my poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction frequently in journals and magazines internationally.
My Philosophy of Teaching Writing My philosophy of teaching writing centers around a balance of speaking and listening to my students. I believe that as a teacher I will learn from my students. I believe that as I guide and teach them rhetorical skills and concepts of composition, they will also teach me new and important things surrounding current modes of communication, underrepresented discourses and communities, and language as it continues to develop in our cultural shifts into more technologically advanced spaces. Scholars like Peter Elbow and Andrea Lunsford instill in me the importance of viewing one's students as equals. Although I realize being the instructor of record will naturally create a dynamic of authority, I do believe that in many ways I am equal to the students I will be instructing. As I view writing as a social and metacognitive mode of communication and reflection, I believe treating students as equals in the classroom by making it clear that I will also learn from them, and that they will learn from each other, supports this notion of writing as social, collaborative, and metacognitive. I believe writing is also often a place of privilege within academia, and I believe in encouraging and supporting students to write in a way that feels comfortable and true to their own intertextual world; I believe students should thoughtfully and intentionally embrace their culture(s), identity, communities, and personal style when composing for academic assignments as to ensure a truly feminist and equitable space in the classroom. I also believe in the validation and acknowledgment of emotions and their role within the writing process. Being transparent about the emotional labor of writing is important in ensuring our students feel validated, encouraged, and understood throughout their journey as writers. I also believe that students should learn all modalities when they write; I believe writing is not limited to just print and page. Rather, I view that composition and rhetorical production occurs in numerous modalities, including video, webtext, imagery, audio/podcast, graphics, print, and any blending of modalities. I believe students should practice and refine their skills in multimodalities as part of a first year composition course to ensure that they are sufficiently and thoughtfully taking into consideration components of rhetorical situations, such as audience, genre, convention, style, tone, argumentation and integration of sources. By having multimodalities be an integral part of the composition course, I believe students will be more prepared in both upper division courses across the disciplines, for opportunities of professional development, and in being active members in their communities. Scholar Henry Jenkins influences my perspective on the importance of participation not only within the classroom, but within the larger culture(s) as well. Therefore, I believe assignments and readings in the composition classroom should not only be multimodal, but also diverse and reflective of the culture(s) our students partake in. Teaching in Online Participatory Spaces Teaching in an entirely online space (or, in the future, a hybrid space) meshes with my teaching philosophy of writing because it serves as an illustrative interface for communities and digital spaces that our students interact with in various ways almost daily. For example, platforms like Google with its various apps (Google docs, Google slides, Google Jamboard, Google Drawing, Google Forms) allows me to utilize multimodality in my instruction by engaging with different (yet easily accessible) interfaces including text, imagery/visuals, linearity and non-linearity, creativity, and intuitive thinking. Additionally, the students can collaborate on these platforms in ways that support community-building and participatory culture, which are two principles integral to my philosophy of teaching and pedagogical approach in the classroom. Students can create visual and intertextual presentations of their ideas, allowing them to experiment and play with audience awareness, genre, convention, style, and tone. I also feel that being online grants us the opportunity to utilize digital communities within social media, acknowledging them as valid sources of knowledge invention. I believe that in order for our students to see the value in building a community within the classroom, we must validate and recognize the importance of their existing communities outside the classroom. In doing so, we can discuss the knowledge invention that occurs within spaces like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, video game communities, fan fiction/fandom communities, etc. When we do this, not only are we validating existing communities they may be a part of, and thus reinforcing the significance of seeking knowledge and critical thinking via writing and participation outside of academia, we also then have the opportunity to discuss genre, convention, audience, and tone within these digital spaces. For example, I can explain how Twitter has a different audience, and therefore different conventions of tone, diction, and structure, than, say, an academic essay or formal article. This can become an activity for the students-- identifying key differences of rhetorical approaches within composition of different genres. This difference in conventions does not inherently mean the academic essay is superior in its knowledge, however-- with all genres of sources we must learn how to evaluate for credibility and critical thinking. These digital spaces also offer us visceral, bodily, and emotional spaces of writing/participation that support emerging theories of electracy within effective modes of learning.I believe online learning, with all of the possibilities we have to engage with, illustrate my teaching philosophies well. |