My undergraduate writing classes focus on writing and rhetoric as a form of social action — a kind of invention and practice that has real consequences. At the first-year level, this means introducing students to the many issues in a "rhetorical situation" that compels them to respond in and through writing.

My advanced undergraduate courses include "writing for community service" and a senior capstone course in writing and publishing currently under development. At the graduate level, my seminars have included qualitative research methods and a special topics course on rhetoric and institutional critique.

As an undergraduate, I had no idea there was such a field as rhetoric and composition; in fact, I majored in Theatre. The publishing industry — through St. Martin's — introduced me to rhetoric and composition. I began working on variously flavored segments of the composition list: basic writing, technical and legal writing, and ESL writing. Later, as an acquisitions editor at Norton, I called on Jim Berlin, of Purdue University, in an attempt to sign him up to write a cultural studies-based rhetoric.

Berlin described his pedagogy to me and argued that he wanted to do things in the classroom that did not necessarily involve textbooks. I had been growing increasingly interested in those writing teachers who avoided textbooks, and I began to want to try such theoretically informed pedagogies myself. The best way to do that was to leave publishing. Happily, I got to work with Berlin for a year and a half before he passed away.

Faculty say and write that textbooks are bad and that the evil companies make authors and teachers do retrogressive things. As a former publisher, I knew about the power of the reviewer — reviewers and consultants can "run" the company in the sense that they are the experts advising editors about where a book should go and what it should do. I tend to see relations between publishers and teachers as very complex and often vexed. At the very least, I see publishers as an underutilized resource in the dissemination of theoretically informed practice.

I am interested in the process of textbook publication rather than the finished product. It's odd for a field that focuses on process that people spend so much time thinking about textbooks as products only. I want to consider the economies underlying the processes: production, reproduction, distribution, exchange — the materiality of these textbooks.

We have a small rhet/comp graduate program, with some part-timers (about 20 total) who teach composition and 28 TA's. They teach in mostly traditional classrooms, with 22 students in a class. Most of us approach the teaching of writing as an explicitly social act in ongoing conversations. I think it's fair to say we lean a bit to the left.

One of the most challenging courses this year is a seminar on institutional critique. It has become an invitation for my graduate students to struggle through my most current research interests with me, as we collectively try to pin down what such a methodology might mean for their own research and teaching. We have been working with the documents portion of the National Archives of Composition and Rhetoric (housed here at URI), and they have been able to see how they might need to construct themselves as subjects within institutions as they continue to work for change through their teaching, scholarship, and service. It's been great fun, and I think we have all learned from one another. Rhetoric affords, perhaps even demands, these kinds of learning opportunities.