Rebecca Gerdes-McClain

Teaching Statement
As a writing teacher, I care deeply about the success of my studentsin my class, in
school, and in their lives. While this care is manifested in many ways, I see it most clearly in the
mandate to meet my students where they are, allowing their backgrounds and needs to drive how
and what I teach. Additionally, because I believe that meaningful writing is the writing we put
the most into and learn the most from, I am invested in creating writing situations with meaning
to my students, letting their ideas and engagement drive their writing as much as possible.
At the University of Oklahoma (OU), I themed my Comp II class around good work in
an effort to make the research and writing done in the class as meaningful to students as possible.
An argumentative writing class, students wrote four major assignments. The first assignment
asks students choose a major or professional field they are considering joining and write about
what good work looks like in that field. Good work, a term from Howard Gardner, Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, and William Damons book Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet
(2001) argues that ethics infuse and complicate all professions through professional standards,
the mission of field, and ones personal ethics. Using these criteria, students are asked to write
about the work they hope to do in these terms. From here, students investigate current debates,
issues, and/or ethical dilemmas in field in an annotated bibliography and an exploratory essay.
The course culminates with a proposal essay, in which students use their definition of good
work in their field to propose a solution, intervention, or first step in resolving an issue facing
the field. While students found the research and different argumentative styles for each essay
challenging, most were also able to investigate topics and questions they cared deeply about. A
student athlete, for example, wrote about what good work means for a student athlete and
ultimately argued that NCAA rules that prevent paying athletes should be overturned but that the
money athletes earn in college, beyond a reasonable monthly stipend, should be put in a trust
fund to be accessed when players turn 30. Again and again students in my class found ways to
get excited about the writing they were doingnot because it was easy or even because it was
funbut because they cared about, often very deeply, the real-life issues they were studying.
Crafting curricula that appeals to student interests looks different in each class. This
semester I am co-teaching ENGL 5113, OUs teaching practicum for new graduate teaching
instructors, with Dr. Sandy Tarabochia. The class is designed to both introduce English graduate
students to Writing Studies and to prepare and support them to succeed as teachers in our
curriculum. One of the major projects we have assigned is a collaborative inquiry project. In
groups, students are asked to identity a question they have about teaching writing which they
then investigate drawing on scholarly sources from Writing Studies and primary research in their
own classrooms. One student, a brand new teacher, has turned this into an opportunity to ask
hard questions: How can we teach our students that failure is part of the writing process and
then give them grades? How can we expect students to buy into this when the very structure of
the course tells them earning an A, not learning through failure, should be their goal? This is
exact the kind of questiona real question that all teachers of writing struggle withthat Dr.
Tarabochia and I hoped students would find. This graduate student is well on her way to
becoming a powerful and committed teacher, and our class has provided her a space to link her
decisions about teaching and grading to research on teaching writing, both what the field has to
offer and what she and her group members will discover through their research. Her own
interests motivated this question and it is that personal connection that I hope will make the
research and writing she does in our class meaningful and important to her.