As an instructor of rhetoric and composition courses, my primary goal in my teaching has been to motivate students to explore communication through a critical and ethical lens.  I believe students can benefit and learn from such exploration only if they feel genuinely motivated and inspired by the progress they make and become more confident in critically analyzing various means of communication autonomously. To accomplish this, I employ several pedagogical strategies that build motivation for students, foster learner autonomy, and help students understand how knowledge and discourse are woven together with the arts of persuasion in written, oral, visual and electronic communication.

To cultivate an atmosphere for critical thinking and intellectual exploration —not only inside the classroom, but also beyond it—, my teaching puts great emphasis on in-class discussions. I try to draw on the different backgrounds and diversity of opinions among students to create an environment in which students can all share comfortable and learn from each other. For example, I determined the main theme the composition class that I taught at Iowa State University, called “Written, Oral, Visual and Electronic Communication,” as technology, and chose a reader called Technology: A Reader for Writers for the course. Almost every week, I assigned argumentative or opinionated articles from the book to students. I also dedicated one class of the week to in-class fishbowl discussions, where I raised provocative questions to students and attempted to get everyone engaged in the discussion. My students, in their mid-term informal course evaluations, stated that these in-class “conversations” were interesting to them, and they felt like they can contribute to the classroom rapport in these conversations as the umbrella term “technology” is arguable for almost everyone. As it is rewarding to see class conversations quickly gain momentum and capture student interest, my use of such activities is driven by my belief in critical thinking, critical listening and how they help students become conscious individuals in general. I believe they develop more quickly intellectually and socially by listening to multiple perspectives and logics. This is true not only for students, but also for me as an instructor too. I constantly learn by receiving informal feedback from students on classroom activities or assignments through emails, by scheduling one-on-one student conferences, and by keeping an “open-door” policy, where I promise to meet with a student at their convenience, to the best of my ability. To be an effective instructor, I believe that I should listen to students and discover their learning styles or possible motivations for them that would guide their learning behavior.

As I aim for an environment in which students engage in critical thinking and exploration, I am also a believer of the idea that students learn from teach each other. My composition courses put great emphasis on group work, specifically peer-feedback, peer-response and peer-evaluation. I consistently employ peer-response activities, where students read each other’s drafts carefully and give feedback to each other. My ways of incorporating these peer-based into my teaching are still evolving since every classroom has different dynamics; however, there is one element that always constitutes the basis of my peer-based activities: classroom as a learning community. At the beginning of the semester, I let my students know that we, as a class, will create a respectful and enthusiastic learning community together. I focus on the idea of “learning together,” dispersing authority and promoting constructive criticism. I adopt learner training activities where I show examples of how to offer criticism without being too “prescriptive,” how to ask questions respectfully or how to deal with an uncooperative group member. Accordingly, my approach promotes the idea that students must be the active members of the community and take certain responsibilities in building a productive learning environment. I have seen that the outcome of such approach is usually positive. For example, in an informal Plus-Delta evaluation survey, my students in a first-year composition course I taught last year (“Critical Reading and Communication”) stated that they enjoy the training session they had been through before they partook in peer-based activities, and like the welcoming learning environment where everybody can make contributions through expressing their opinions respectfully. Enacting this principle is sometimes challenging depending on the students’ willingness or their understanding of the role of teacher in the classroom, but in my classroom teaching experience, I found that the results are worth it.

Of course, as I adopt the student-centered approach in my teaching, I do not completely abandon the traditional role of teacher. I believe students need formal, direct instruction when they face a new phenomenon in their classes. In my classes, when we start handling new subjects, I still tend to give formal instructions to my students by following a more teacher-centered approach. I believe, in early stages of learning, formal instruction is more beneficial from students in terms of establishing and understanding new concepts. I can confidently say, based on my experience, that majority of college students find this approach very useful. For example, writing rhetorical analysis essays is and has always been challenging for learners. Before I assign a rhetorical analysis essay to my students, I introduced important concepts such as ethos, pathos, logos and executed in-class activities where groups of students worked on same articles to spot examples of such concepts and discuss how they are used to “get the message across” by the author. I can confirm that this traditional teaching method, which may be seen “unfitting” by some college instructors, still provides fruitful learning opportunities to learners.

I aim to show how the teaching strategies I follow in my teaching help students become better thinkers, communicators and learners in outlining the pedagogical principles that guide my teaching style. I follow these strategies and principled because I believe that they provide a path for becoming a better individual, and bettering one’s community.

Altay Ozkul