Key Words

Audience	This refers to the intended recipient of the author’s message. Aristotle recognized the importance of audience in rhetoric in ancient Greece. He advocated appealing to the audience through ethos, pathos and logos. Ede and Lunsford also write about the importance of audience how the two schools of thought on audience (addressed and invoked) fail to grasp the complexity of the rhetorical situation. Ede and Lunsford suggest that the audience is addressed when the composition is edited to meet their expectations and they are invoked when the author imagines the role that the audience will play and builds prompts into the writing for the audience to recognize their role.
David Bartholomae	Author of “Inventing the University,” Bartholomae writes about the difficulties that students face in their attempt to enter academia. Students must learn the language, customs, and “codes” of the academy in order to become part of a discourse community that they are somewhat ignorant of (at least to begin with). Bartholomae indicates the student’s work can be analyzed to ascertain where the students are within this discourse community and society as a whole.
Patricia Bizzell	Talks about contact zones as a new way to approach composition studies. The contact zone is defined as a meeting place between cultures where conflict occurs. According to Bizzell, literary study should be divided and studied based on contact zones in order for students to have a true multicultural understanding of how knowledge and power was constructed.
Critical thinking	Critical thinking is the ability to analyze and reflect upon an idea and understand the relationships that the idea has with the world around. Ira Shor and James Berlin are proponents of pedagogies that encourage critical thinking. In their writings they state that students should be taught about how knowledge is formed and the social nature of knowledge building. Understanding that knowledge creation is a social function allows the student to explore beyond the façade of the concept, and to join in the academic discussion as a peer within the discourse community.
Peter Elbow	Elbow wrote about the “mother tongue” and the academy’s past record of trying to eradicate all but Standard Written English from formal composition. Elbow suggests that allowing students to identify and use their own dialects will enrich the world of composition by allowing a range of voices to be heard that had previously been suppressed. The students would benefit from using their mother tongue because they would no longer be marginalized, and would be able to establish their own identity in their work.
Freewriting	Peter Elbow wrote about the benefits of freewriting. Freewriting is when you begin writing whatever comes to mind and you do not stop to edit. Elbow suggests that writing is often encumbered by simultaneous editing that detracts from the rhythm of the composition. Freewriting allows the student to focus on what they want to say, and to spend less time focusing on how they say it. By freewriting, Elbow suggests that students will be able to find their “voice” as writers.
Richard Fulkerson	Fulkerson wrote about the four philosophies of composition which he identified as formal, expressive, rhetorical and mimetic.  Formalist composition values internal forms such as spelling and grammar and good writing is measured by the writer’s ability to write correctly. Expressionist composition values personal exploration rather than formal structures and the author’s “voice” is seen as a key component of “good” writing. Mimetic composition states that good writing is a reflection of good thinking and that logical, well-reasoned and factually substantiated writing is good writing. Rhetorical composition measures good writing by the author’s ability to achieve the desired effect on the desired audience.

Keywords and my Syllabus

James Berlin describes the major pedagogical theories of composition, which include Classicist, Current-traditionalists, Expressionists and New Rhetoricians. Berlin is an advocate of the latter theory and describes this as a theory that embraces the changing nature of rhetoric in the face of political, social and economic forces that shape accepted knowledge.
The writings of James Berlin greatly affected my course design. I believe that my teaching philosophy falls under the title of social-epistemic rhetoric, which Berlin advocates as a form of New Rhetoric. According to this theory rhetoric is a political action involving the interactions between the  material world, discourse community and writer. My course assignments attempt to have students question the role of politics in knowledge creation, and to see how this can affect composition.

Praxis is described as practicing theory. I encountered the term in an article by Ira Shor. Shor discusses praxis in the teaching of critical thinking and explains that critical thinking is a theory in practice (praxis) that takes input from the students and creates dialogue and reflection. One of my mission statements is to practice theory that encourages critical thinking.

Marginalization occurs frequently in academia. Paulo Freire writes about marginalization in his article on the banking concept. In the banking concept the student is viewed as an empty vessel to be filled with the knowledge of the teacher. This style of pedagogy marginalizes the student by making them subordinate to the teacher who expects the student to memorize and then regurgitate the information that has been chosen by the dominant culture without analysis or reflection.
I have attempted to create a syllabus that can change with the interests of the students and recognize individual experience in the making of meaning. This is an attempt to ensure that knowledge creation is a collaborative process between student and student and teacher and students.

Post-process theory occurred as a reaction to the process movement within composition. Post-process denies the ability to teach a set of steps or mechanical techniques that will result in "good" writing. There is no post-process pedagogy, since much of post-process scholarship focuses on criticisms of process theory.  According to Kastman-Breuch, post-process theory advocates increased student involvement and dialogue. The post-process idea of writing as public influenced my syllabus and resulted in a focus on peer dialogue.

Expressive writing is part of the expressionist or neo-platonic theory of composition. According to this theory, truth is based on personal understanding of sensory experiences, and writing cannot convey truth, but merely remove error. I attempted to distance myself from this theory except where it overlaps with social-epistemic rhetoric. The expressionist theory places the existence of truth in the individual, and therefore underplays the role of politics and other factors in the construction of truth.