In “The Teacher as Exhibitor,” Ted Hovet argues that the professor is much like an early film exhibitor: pulling together disparate elements to create meaning, arranging material, and engaging the audience. Hovet considers how much of what we do as teachers lies in the balance between performance and scene staging. While exhibitors demand ticket sales from their audiences, I instead am charged with the task of creating classrooms where the skills and experience learned move students forward into future research in disciplines, careers, and understandings of the world around them. As a professor, I am aware that my students come from disparate disciplines and that few of my students will focus on careers in academic criticism and publication. My goal is to create lifelong thinkers who can transfer these critical skills to a variety of professional and co-curricular situations. As an exhibitor, I see my job as using the short time I have with students to create an introductory space that leads students down paths of learning they might travel for the rest of their lives.

Because in 15 weeks I can in no way prepare students for every individual encounter they will have with texts in their future, I instead adopt texts that catch students’ interest in the discipline early on. Examples include recently discussing kairos through the use of Beyonce’s release of “Formation” just days before her appearance at the 2016 Super Bowl. As the semester progresses, students use class presentations to introduce their own texts to the class, giving students more voice in content and deprivileging my own personal taste in classroom examples.

I scaffold assignments through the semester, encouraging students to synthesize and evaluate information in order to create knowledge. Students practice low-stakes writing in almost every class practicing academic and professional writing situations. Daily writing activities include creating questions for class and applying course documents to students’ individual research interests. Lower stakes assignments allow students to practice media conventions in preparation for higher stakes assignments. In practice students in my technical editing course must reflect in class on the purpose of a technical manual used with the game Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes; students must then edit that document to change it from its original purpose (intentional obfuscation to slow down the player) to a new purpose (clarity to quickly help the player) while maintaining the general tone and feel of the original. As students transition to the more formal final paper, they can transfer skills developed in technical editing from this lower stakes assignment.

Aligned with my research in games, work and online communities, I use digital assignments to help students simulate writing and production as collaborative processes. Students learn to interpret and produce texts in both traditional and digital media formats. They evaluate the affordances of print, visual, and auditory media to produce rhetorically strong arguments. In encouraging my students to embrace invention, I help students to work in mediums and with software they are less familiar with. For instance, when in College Composition II, students use a Tumblr blog to track collaboratively produced annotated bibliographies in small groups, simulating a discourse community. They produce individual final papers where they can cite the posts of classmates (budding scholarly experts) as secondary sources. This helps students understand that research is done in a community and that community members often know and are directly speaking to other subject experts. For their final project the small group collaborates on a game teaching a core theme shared in their papers, showing that a paper need not be the final iteration of a research project.

In summary, I see my role as creating a space to introduce major concepts in composition, new media, and cultural studies. I continue to bring new, pedagogically grounded, tools to the classroom that prove rhetorical and textual studies to be both relevant and engaging. Ultimately, this philosophy is not made successful by what they produce in my class, but by what they do with this information in future courses and research situations.
Hovet, Ted. “The Teacher as Exhibitor: Pedagogical Lessons from Early Film Exhibition” Rev. of August 28, 2012. Pedagogy 6.2 (2006): 8.