Pedagogy
In the comments to my career pathway's post, ?bumbagh drew out the connection between teaching and scholarship (or intellectual practice.) I would like to explore pedagogy in more depth, both as part of the series on scholarship on the rhizome blog and independently on the wiki. This page may move around on the wiki.
Formal Classes
I'm interested in teaching formal writing classes. While I don't really want to teach freshman writing to anyone, I think it would be pretty interesting to help train professional writers. The basic descriptions of the course, goals, and inspiration for the ideas follow. In some ways this list is the cousin of ?talk-proposal.
If anyone is interested in taking one of the classes described below or finding a way to get me in front of actual students, I'd love some help and support here. Be in touch. Also remember that this is a wiki. I'm aware that these thoughts are pretty rough on my initial pass, so please do edit.
Blogging Intensive Workshop
I'm convinced that the thing that made it possible for me to "be a writer" is my blog. a practice of writing regular posts for a few years taught me how to take any morsel of an idea and write a few paragraphs on the topic. Blogging taught me how to sense audience, even if I haven't responded well to that audience.
I think it would have been great if I had a class in college that said: write 3 or 4 posts in a blog a week (which is a lot,) about various topics (some of your choosing, some not.) Do that for four months. Get the content out onto the internet, lead discussion threads, and just see what happens. Students would, by the end:
Have experience with voice. The only way to be able to write clearly and effectively as yourself without becoming bogged down in affected prose is by a lot of practice.
Write more clearly and more concisely. Shorter, clearer blog posts are more successful than longer ones. That's a huge part of the form, and four months and ten or twenty thousand words to learn this seems pretty speedy. Having to write regularly, and at volume, makes it easier to figure out how to improve core communication skills.
Learn how to edit and polish your own writing, sufficiently to avoid distracting from what you're saying (one of my biggest challenges,) without developing an obsessive complex.
Reflexively communicate an idea in a brief essay or note, without second thought. There's a difference between being able to have a conversation about an idea or taking some ideas and build an essay (eventually) and "real writing." Turning conversations into arguments and ideas automatically is really key.
Long Form Text and Collaboration
In college, I learned a lot about how to write a lot of different kinds of papers. I can probably still auto-pilot thought anything from "about a page" to about 10-20 pages. And maybe I wrote a paper something that was 30 pages on a single project. But I never wrote anything longer than that in school. As a result I never really learned how to write and manage longer structured texts, and these are exactly the kind of texts that are the core of professional writing, and arguably good academic writing as well. I was also unprepared for working as/with an Editor in realistic situations.
The basic plan for the class is to present an outline of a book on day-one, and have the class develop a method and a plan to complete the book by the end of the semester. The course would spend a few weeks covering the material for the book and talking about the research process. But after a week or two (at most,) I'd turn into a project manager for the rest of the term to help them write and edit a manuscript. The learning objectives/major writing lessons:
How to think about writing as a top-down process (moving from chapters to collections of sections and paragraphs) rather than bottom-up (moving from words, to sentences, to paragraphs.)
How to edit other people's work. I think of this as "caring about sentences."
How to let other people rewrite your work and learn from the experience. There's a lot of effort and work that goes into preventing cheating in academic writing. The end result is to enshrine the right of the author to have full control of their text, which isn't realistic or particularly productive.
How to draft effectively so that other people can build on your work. Drafts can and should have notes to yourself to "write more about a particular idea," they can have unfinished sections, and they can have sections that get left on the cutting room floor. Drafts can have sections that are just collections of quotes and links. Drafts aren't just fully written versions in need of a little polish.
While I like the idea of "turning in a draft," to a professor as a way of ensuring that students have some sort of writing process, I think the truth is that most drafts don't look enough like a paper for this to be a useful exercise.
Writing as Teaching
Another thought, separate from teaching formally, is that much of writing I'm doing contributing to tychoish.com is pedagogical itself. While it's not always been intentional, a great part of my writing here attempts to explain topics, draw connections and ask leading questions. After all, that is basically what the best seminars do anyway.
Technical Writing as Pedagogy
Technical writing is largely a pedagogical practice. The overlap between good rhetorical and technical skills is not as uncommon as good technical writing skills. While being able to communicate technical concepts is a challenge, the "magic" lies in being able to understand your audience and tailor documentation and resources to their needs. That is at it's core a pedagogical exercise.
And that's just in "conventional" technical writing (comprehensive manuals, specifications, API reference materials, release notes.) I'm increasingly convinced that most of the words spilled by technical writers are actually far more pedagogical: training materials, procedural guides, technology overviews, white papers, and so forth. It's all teaching people about something.
Blogging as a Teaching Tool
My blog posts: present an idea, (hopefully!), a little background or context, a few resources as links, and a whole slew of questions. That also describes many college lectures, or at least the best ones
So maybe, following from bumbagh's comment the teaching element of my intellectual-practice is already established. I still want to explore it more, but it's a starting point.