With over twenty years of university teaching experience, I continue to enjoy engaging students in projects that challenge them to consider authentic purposes and audiences for their work. For me this means that students should write with the mindset that their ideas matter and that their writing can result in change, whether change be individual or social. Therefore, my students produce texts that can circulate in culture if they choose and that engage rhetorical situations that matter to them in culturally relevant genres (e.g., video essays, public service announcements, professional documents, family or organizational archives, design projects, tutorials, ethics projects). If students are engaged in their writing, it's far more likely they will invest in the content, structure, and conventions of writing that are the core outcomes in my classes. I do not see writing courses as skill-oriented to prepare students for other opportunities in the academy and beyond. Rather, writing classes have valuable content that if learned well and internalized will transfer to other writing occasions. The field of Rhetoric and Composition has established a rich body of theory, research, and practice that should guide the way we teach and deliver writing to students, but our work goes beyond pedagogy into other valuable arenas worth of study within the academy.

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In my time working in Clemson's Master's in Professional Communication (MAPC) and in Florida State's Rhetoric and Composition Program, I have served on many committees:

• Dissertation Director: 7 students

• Dissertation Committee: 24 students

• Thesis Director: 18 students

• Thesis Committee: 42

I have also formally and informally mentored many of these students in professional development, including writing conference proposals and papers, writing manuscripts for publication, preparing for comprehensive exams, preparing for the job market, developing ePortfolios, conducting workshops, etc.​

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