Kristin Winet

Teaching Philosophy
I believe that higher education should prepare students for understanding the plurality of their lives: as
students, writers, critical thinkers, global citizens, and future professionals, and, perhaps more
importantly, as dynamic members of these communities with the power to change the world around
them. Whether I am teaching technical and professional writing, rhetoric and research, or
developmental reading and writing to international students, I am committed to what I have come to
call a pedagogy of travel, a pedagogy based on composition scholar Mara Lugones theory of
world-traveling as coalition-building through playful interaction, recognition of our subjectivities,
and allowing ourselves to see and be seen from multiple perspectives. It is grounded in feminist praxis
and focuses on creative inquiry, rhetorical awareness, community engagement, and active listening.
As I have grown as a teacher of writing, I have come to see creative inquiry at the heart of playa skill
that asks students to step outside their comfort zones and allow themselves to make mistakes, go
through multiple drafts, and ask uncomfortable questions. In all of my first-year writing courses, I
often begin a lesson by asking students to write in a journal in order to declutter their minds and allow
them a creative space to think. In my technical writing classes, I help students overcome their fear of
using unfamiliar technologies by asking them to play with a new software or program, such as
Piktochart, or I will ask them to create purposefully unconventional designs in order to expand their
ideas about design. I have found that by emphasizing creative inquiry, students are much more willing
to engage in lessons, create connections in class, and open up during discussion.
No matter which course I teach, I always encourage a high level of rhetorical awareness, asking my
students to critically examine the way rhetoricwhether print or digital, textual, visual, or spatial
works in the world. In a first-year writing course on genre awareness, for instance, I took students to
our Student Union and asked them to critically analyze the way education is portrayed inside the walls
of our bookstore and decide if a place could be considered a genre. This lesson, which brought up
conversations about consumerism and visual design, inspired my students to travel to another space,
both literally and theoretically, in order to rethink their assumptions about the neutrality of space.
Community engagement is a central feature to my pedagogical foundations as well, because I believe it
teaches students to be more empathetic, connected citizens to their community and to see themselves
as writers through others eyes. For three years, for example, I volunteered in the University of
Arizonas Wildcat Writers program, pairing my students with local high school classes and asking them
to collaborate, listen, learn from, and also mentor their partners. In a first-year rhetoric class, my high
school teaching partner and I asked our students to write and exchange autobiographies with a partner
and then create a creative artifact. The exchange was inspiring: students crafted such multi-modal
artifacts as paintings, maps, dioramas, 3-D collages, posters, and playlists. This activity embodied the
idea of traveling as coalition-building, because by sharing their writing, our students were able to
understand a little bit more about who they were as well as how they fit into a larger community.
Lastly, I advocate for active, mindful listening in everything we do, from in-class discussion to peer
review to working in the community. Listening requires students to be literate in many ways, from
knowing how to write for different audiences needs to accepting other points of view and ways of life.
Last semester, for instance, I partnered my students with the national Head Starts adult literacy
program, and we collected stories and photographs from refugees and immigrants whom the program
serves in order to design a new website, social media campaign, and pamphlets for interested
volunteers. This intimately brought to life a kind of traveling into other worldviews and
communities, inspiring many of my students to continue writing and volunteering after our semester
together. No matter what I am teaching or to whom, my commitment to praxis, self-reflexivity, and
compassion are now and always at the heart of the classroom.