Details
I am the creator and editor of the developing online digital archive for Fanny Fern, America's First Woman Columnist.
Pedagogy
Teaching Philosophy
Based on my experience teaching First Year Writing, while also having experience as a Writing Coach in a community college writing studio, I understand the need to provide students with an inclusive space where they can become comfortable with their own personal skill sets and knowledge of writing, and learn how to transfer and apply these assets in other [future] contexts and scenarios. Drawing upon a student’s experiences, and building upon that knowledge to move them forward towards a personalized process of composition and rhetorical strategies to effectively communicate creates student success inside and outside of the classroom.
My experience teaching FYC has been to serve as a facilitator helping students to navigate through their own personalized process-based relationship with writing; thus, the instructional value for a student in a first-year writing course should be focalized on meeting the individual writer, their experiences and their knowledge where they are at in that moment. In one of my first ENC 1101 courses, an introductory composition course taught online during the pandemic, I had a student who regularly missed assignments resulting in a negative impact on his grade. During a one-on-one virtual conference, I inquired about this lack of participation to which they responded that they felt they were not a good writer, but was instead self-identified as an athlete (a football player) who knew that they would never pass this class because of some predefined expectation for how submitted assignments should look and read. After a thoughtful discussion, I explained to this student that writing was a process that was individualized and personal, one that had to be explored and engaged with in order to be useful. But by not participating, you would never be able to grow the skill. After realizing that I was not holding them accountable for an unobtainable expectation of perfected writing, the student began to regularly participate in the course assignments and projects, and ended the course with a passing grade and a renewed confidence in their ability to effectively communicate through writing.
Students crave a curriculum that resonates with them and gives them purpose, value and agency in the classroom and outside of it. An ENC 1102 student of mine, for instance, shared with me at the end of the semester that she had utilized her newly recognized skills of composition and rhetorical strategy, alongside the research-based skills facilitated in the second course of first-year composition, to secure a sizable scholarship from a heritage-based fraternal organization; she had done so by composing a nomination letter, researching the organization and its values, crafting the letter based on contextual genre, and appealing to rhetorical devices to ultimately persuade the scholarship committee to present her with the award. To craft a curriculum that makes a student and their evolving self-knowledge feel valued is to create a supportive space to continue a learning practice and reiterative process that engages with composition alongside a student’s reflection of their relationship and experience with self and other communicative praxis.
As a teacher, I hope to encourage individuals to place value in their own self-knowledge and experiences of composition and rhetorical praxis, while also having the space to network, collaborate and engage in this praxis with others; this evokes a critical, pedagogical moment that enables students to have confidence in their ability to become effective communicators.
Courses Taught
(featured below):
2019 M.A. Thesis
ENC 1101 - First Year Composition
ENC 1101 builds on what a student already knows about writing and helps them to develop new strategies to adapt to a variety of writing situations that they will find in college and beyond. Our goal in 1101 is to provide a foundation for students to develop and refine the knowledge and practices that support writing, critical thinking, and rhetorical understanding. Our focus is on the intellectual rigor, writer's self-agency, and collaborative competencies connected to success within and beyond USF.
ENC 1102 - First Year Composition
ENC 1102 is a required prerequisite for courses across USF and provides the foundation for the development of skills associated with academic writing and critical thinking that will be necessary in your academic work, as well as your personal and professional communication and reasoning.
Professional Writing
The Professional Writing course is an introduction to the techniques and types of professional writing, including correspondence and reports. It is designed to help strengthen skills of effective business and professional communication in both oral and written modes.
*before I received a professional opportunity, I was qualified and about to teach the following courses in Fall 2022.
Technical Writing for Health Science Majors
This course exposes students to a variety of communicative means for expressing technical and semi-technical information. Through smaller assignments and major projects, this course prepares students to pursue and engage with the communicative components of a career in the health sciences.
*before I received a professional opportunity, I was qualified and about to teach the following courses in Fall 2022.
Course Development Experience
During my Professional and Technical Practicum coursework, I worked collaboratively with two other colleagues to create a bridge curriculum between the First-Year Composition writing program and the Professional and Technical writing program. Our guiding outcome of this course development was as follows:
Course Goals:
The goals of this course are to help students create a transparent bridge of disciplinary knowledge between composition and rhetoric with a focus on/in a professional context to establish a connection between FYC knowledge gained and to transfer that knowledge into TPC knowledge to be gained.
Course Outcomes:
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Identify purpose, audience, and design
Communicate clearly for a distinct audience(s) across genres while exploring and defining the following concepts over the semester:
Purpose, Audience, Design, Genre, Exigence, Rhetorical Situation, Context, Knowledge, Community of Practice, Assessment, Praxis
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Locate, explore, and integrate information within different contexts
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Develop collaborative skills through peer interaction and production
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Establish a personalized communication process, which may include planning, creation, collaboration, and revision
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Interpret language use across contexts and demonstrate an understanding of how this creates effective communication.
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To develop a “conceptual framework” that enables the transfer of writing knowledge and practice through reflection.
My contribution focused on a reiteration of FYC-based ENC 1101, to steer it's trajectory of knowledge cultivation towards a more natural path for a student to enroll in Professional and Technical Service courses later on in their university experience to further develop their written communication skills and keep them in a reiterative process of personalized writing instruction.
I created the following reoriented assignments for this theoretical course (based on previous 1101 FYC projects) and grounded it more in Professional and Technical Communication praxis:
Assignment 1: Individual Self Assessment
This first assignment will function as a performance review of the self which thinks about your purpose as a writer and communicator, incorporating and analyzing current knowledge, beliefs, and approaches to writing. To complete this assessment, you will locate examples of your own writing outside of this course from different contexts; for each of your writing examples, consider what was your purpose, who was your audience, and in what genre/design did you communicate your writing with?
Your individual self assessment can be any length, as long as you adequately explore the rhetorical situation of purpose, audience, and design within your own writing examples and integrate these examples into your assessment using the question: “How do the decisions that I make as a writer and communicator shift? How does my writing adapt when functioning within different communities of practice, i.e. for other distinct audiences?”
Assignment 3: Genre-building for the Community and rhetorical decision-making of the Self
In the third assignment, students will consider the knowledge they gained and the written, communicative practices they learned from observing a chosen community of practice. Scaffolding on this knowledge, and considering that a “text” can be broadly defined as any piece of writing designed to convey an informative message to a chosen audience(s). In this project, you will create that text with consideration to appropriate genre, and aspects of purpose, audience and design that will influence the rhetorical decisions you make dependent upon a strategic analysis of the writing situation that your community of practice operates within; you will also accompany this genre sample with a project memo analysis in which you will reflect on your own process of creating that text and the rhetorical decision-making that went into it. Each student may create something vastly different (a forum post posing a question, a meme or set of memes, a tweet thread, an Instagram post, a short video, a podcast episode, etc.). The requirements for this genre composition are that it incorporate writing for an identified community of practice in some significant way, and that it be guided by the following question: “How do the decisions I make as a writer and communicator shift? How does my writing adapt when functioning within different communities of practice, i.e. other distinct audiences?”
Assignment 2: Observing a Community of Practice
In the second assignment, students choose a community of practice, a collective group of individuals with like-minded communicative goals, and then identify elements of purpose, audience, genre, and design that exist within this specific context. From this observation, students will interpret the shifting of language use across contexts and audiences thereby transferring knowledge and experience through communication. Students will develop this assignment using the guiding question: "How do people in this community of practice adapt their writing to communicate effectively within this community? How do these language practices generate and transfer knowledge among individuals?”
Students’ deliverable for this assignment will be a 3-page memo identifying:
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An interpretation of rhetorical elements of communication with examples from the community of practice
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An elaboration of their chosen community’s writing praxis, as examples
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A demonstrated understanding of how these elements work together to create effective communication.
Assignment 4: Course Knowledge and Performance Review
In the final assignment, students will:
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assess their knowledge and experience before entering the course (a task completed in assignment 1);
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and then consider how that knowledge has expanded and grown with the accumulated knowledge they have learned from the course. From here, students will evaluate how this accumulated knowledge might help them effectively communicate in certain communities of practice (an observation made in assignment 2)’
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and how they might further that knowledge by putting it into action and engaging in rhetorical decision-making and written communication dependent upon their audience(s) and contextual situation (a task accomplished in assignment 3)
in the form of a course knowledge and performance review totaling 3-5 pages.
Combining knowledge from all three previous assignments, students should be able to assess their accumulated knowledge, provide a performance review on their own participation in the course, including their own presence with the collaboration, drafting and revision aspects, and intuitively explain how a transfer of writing knowledge and practice might/will occur for them using previous knowledge and experience, combined with learned knowledge and experience from the course into future contexts and situations (like academic (i.e. future classes), personal and professional (i.e. workplace) contexts).
Students will write this final performance review piece utilizing the following question: "What have I learned about writing and myself as a writer this semester, and what ideas about writing can I take forward with me into the writing I'll do in the future? What skills and knowlege can I adapt to future writing scenarios?”
And I created an example an in-class activity for Assignment 3:
Genre-building for the Community and rhetorical decision-making of the Self (external link)
Certifications
Online Instructor Certification (2021)
University of South Florida
Educational Technology: Web Design (ongoing)
University of South Florida
Certified Microsoft Innovative Educator (2021)
University of South Florida
Research Interests
Haley's current research interests are in:
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Digital rhetoric impacts on information infrastructures and the affect this has on public dissemination and understanding of information and knowledge transfer/control; the way in which computational tools can and have affected the collective public memory;
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Actively building a Humanities-based model of a digital archive for Fanny Fern, America's first woman columnist at FannyFernArchive.org; a context-heavy, user-centered digital archive that provides an agential space where users can (re)act to and interpret the past using their own experience and deduction to better navigate present and future empirical structures of knowledge;
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Use of the Burkean comedic frame, satirical writing, in combination with fourth-wave digital and technofeminism;
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The hauntological aspect of Derridean theory in consideration of the original and the replicate as creating a present haunting from the past in analyzing how dominant ontologies of truth are scissioned upon public knowledge, altering meaning for public audiences and institutionalizing public memory through lenses of canonical narratives; this concept is complicated further with maker culture and advancing technology, with logic functioning as a tool to (re)create meaning for individuals [like technofemist and scholar Donna Haraway's modest witness] in a world where meaning is represented to them.
Publications
Interrogating the Digital Infrastructure of Humanities-Based Educational Technologies: Interviews with three current maker-practitioners in the Humanities Field (ongoing)
A web text journal article being crafted for the call for interviews for Kairos: a journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy about my own personal interviews with three current educational technology practitioner-makers across different Humanities contexts.
The Inhospitable Rhetoric of Feminist Satire: Michelle Wolf’s 2018 White House Correspondents’ Speech (2020)
Accepted to the 2020 Rhetorical Society of America Conference held in Seattle, Washington, in this proposal I argue that Wolfe’s speech embodies elements of the carnivalesque as she criticizes American society openly and honestly, without limits - but with humor; her satire creates a unique space of “protected” inhospitable rhetoric within a hospitable setting. Furthermore, identifying as a comedian, her inhospitable behavior is justified but was still met with controversy and negative reaction from some audience members, yet others recognized her comic framing and understood her unique and memorable message that was funny because it was true.
Fanny Fern: The Feminist We Never Knew We Needed and Why (ongoing)
Conference paper in progress about Fanny Fern’s forgotten attribution of authorship for the quotation “the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.” I trace the use of Fern’s quotation and it’s multitude of context and meanings, showcasing how information infrastructures of public memory have worked to distort her ‘ownership’ of this quote and its originally intended meaning. These dominant infrastructures of knowledge have replaced her originally intended meaning with one that has been tainted by a culturally canonized knowledge – one that shifts her female-empowering quotation to a context that seems subservient. since its original conception in 1853.
Fanny Fern: The Feminist We Never Knew We Needed (2019)
A Master's thesis published via ProQuest by The University of North Carolina at Greensboro about America's First Woman Columnist, her silence from public memory, and a socio-contexual analysis and literature review contemplating her misrepresented dissemination of texts.
Only Existing Electronically: How E-Girls and Boys: How Social Isolation Fostered Online Community in Hypersexualized Child-like Social Media Trends (ongoing)
This is a developing research article reviewing how social isolation facilitated the launch of a 2020 social media trend that idolizes "electronic girls and boys" with alternative aesthetic appearances, hypersexualized child-like aesthetics, slight nods to Dom culture, and a character existence that is only present and lived in online spaces.
Service
USF Writes
I had the opportunity to work with the digital, educational tool USF Writes, engaging in project management of PTC and FYC student teams to extract efficient information about the tool relevant to both programs with the goal of developing instructor and student-facing pedagogical and instructional resources and materials related to the use of the pedagogical tool.
Rhetoric of Health and Medicine
I had the opportunity to project manage and copyedit five journal issues for the Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. I copyedited, proofread and modifying article content to fit APA 7 stylistic guidelines. I offered content suggestions for authors and maintained web content for the academic journal.
Student Reviews
With all reviews featured in the slides below, students have agreed to share their opinions anonymously.