Studying Rhetoric and Composition has taught me the importance of education. However, what I have learned in my career in English at Georgia State has less to do with the importance of what is taught, but rather how one teaches. Following graduation, I plan on teaching English as a foreign language as a way to travel, but also to dip my toes into teaching in front of a classroom. After this, I am considering pursuing an advanced degree in English, as my studies have brought me to the conclusion that disrupting problematic teaching methods and ideologies is an active way to generate social change. While social justice has always been important to me, I had not considered teaching as a way to participate in this kind of activism; it took most of my career in Rhetoric and Composition to reach this conclusion.

My journey began with a failure. I entered GSU as a music major, hoping to focus on jazz guitar. However, my limited musical background left me ill-equiped to audition for the School of Music. With dashed hopes and little idea of what I wanted to study, I continued with my coursework. At the time, I was taking Composition II from a graduate student, Matthew Sansbury. I later would have the opportunity to study alongside him, but during his semester teaching 1102, Mr. Sansbury opened up a world of study that I was unaware of prior to his class. Until that point in my education, I had always assumed that to study English meant either focusing on literature or creative writing. But here we were in an English class watching Game of Thrones, and analyzing the visual rhetoric of scenes from a television show. One day, after class, I explained my situation to Mr. Sansbury and asked whether this sort of study was something that I could pursue further in the English department. He explained the Rhetoric and Composition concentration to me and pointed me to Dr. Lopez as a source for guidance.

Since Mr. Sansbury’s class I have been enamored with the study of rhetoric in its many forms. Through these studies I developed my personal definition of rhetoric: the manipulation of symbols to communicate information in a way that is conscious of the audience(s), their perception of the author(s), and the form(s) to which the information is bound. This definition results from studying the Rhetoric across many different applications and courses.

Dr. Lopez’s Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition introduced me to the origins of rhetoric. While I do not often give much thought to the ancient Grecian philosophers, it is impossible to deny their influences on my personal views on rhetoric. For instance, I concur with Aristotle in my preference for logos over pathos and ethos (Aristotle, Rhetoric). That is not to say that I do not find more enjoyment appealing to an audience’s sense of pathos, but I believe that logic has a sway over the other two domains of rhetoric. Demonstration of logic can give ethos to one’s argument, because regardless of audiences’ opinions, they may find trust and credibility through the rhetor’s logic. Likewise, a logical approach may trump the emotions holding an audience back from being persuaded.

Introduction to Rhetoric and Composition also gave me the first opportunity in my studies to apply the study of rhetoric to another subject that I hold dear. For our final paper, we were allowed to chose any topic to write about in relation to the subject of rhetoric. I chose to write about the rhetoric of Third-wave feminism. While I do not credit this paper as the most sophisticated, eloquent, or well-argued piece of work included in my portfolio, I do mark it as an important moment of clarity in my educational career: there were applications for studying rhetoric that are immediately relatable to my outside interests. Not only was I allowed to study what I wanted to study, but I was encouraged to contribute my research to the body of scholarship.

Dr. Lopez’s class set the foundations for my education in rhetoric and composition, but I did not start to find my voice as a rhetor until Dr. Harker’s Composition Studies: History, Theory, and Practice. Through this class and his graduate level course in Literacy, I came to understand the importance of Composition Studies and Literacy Studies. In his undergraduate level course, I saw not only the importance of literacy, and the complicated role it plays in access and social mobility, but the complications that arise when it is misunderstood.

The course used David Barton’s Literacy as a touchstone. In it, Barton discusses the language surrounding the subject of literacy, in particular, the danger of the “disease metaphor.” By treating non-literate people as “ill,” one assumes that, given treatment, the ailments associated with “illiteracy” will disappear (Barton, Literacy, Blackwell, 1994). This treatment entirely ignores aspects of class, race, gender, location, and a slew of other factors that affect access and social mobility—things that are traditionally presumed to be aided by literacy. This is not to say that there is not a relationship between literacy and social mobility, but it is to say that there is danger in oversimplifying a subject.

My final paper in this class, “Questioning Education,” was an exploration of ideology and modes of education in the classroom—specifically the liberating aspects of social-epistemic rhetoric in conjunction with the environmental mode of instruction. I consider this paper the next step in my development as not only a rhetor but a student and a scholar. With this paper, I broke away from the need to apply the course’s subject matter to an outside topic, as I had found a strong and genuine interest in an aspect of the course itself. At this point that rhetoric stopped being something I was studying and became something I thought about on a regular basis—something that affected the way I lived and moved through the world. By seeing the role that Literacy plays in its many different forms, and how deeply it impacts society, I began to more seriously consider teaching as a viable method for social change.

The graduate level course Dr. Harker taught felt much like an extension of his undergraduate course. Critical reading, writing, and thinking skills introduced in the first course were developed more fully in the second. When reading a text, we were expected to locate the central argument being made, identify the article’s limits, put the text in conversation with another scholar we had previously read, and develop open-ended questions. These critical thinking skills transferred directly into my own writing. Critical writing meant being able to create a concise argument that, through writing, I would evolve by the end of the piece. It also meant being able to identify and name the limits of my argument, as well as put scholars in conversation with one another in order to develop my argument. Through these practices, I have come to recognize critical thinking as not only the ability to look at how a text makes its argument, but how to harness this assessment to be beneficial to one’s own rhetorical practice.

Our final paper for Dr. Harker’s Topics in Literacy course was to choose a subject to write about in the context of literacy. I chose to write about literacy in the context of video games. In my paper, “Play Books: Expanding Education Using Gone Home as a Teachable Text,” I conducted a critical playthrough of Fullbright’s Gone Home in the context of James Paul Gee’s learning principles of video games. I argue that video games have a place in the classroom as texts to be studied not only for their substance and potential for critical thinking, but as texts that offer certain elements that alphabetic texts do not provide. I believe this piece to be representative of my development as a rhetor and a scholar. In this piece, I take the passion for literacy studies I grew in Composition: History, Theory, and Practice, and marry it with my love for video games. In addition, I brought video games, something that I rarely considered worthy of scholarly review, into a conversation about digital texts and education. This text also demonstrated my ability to read and think critically about not only scholarly writing, but creative texts as well.

Writing “Play Books” showed me not only that I could produce a text worthy of publication (after significant revision), but that scholarly writing may be something I would like involved in my career. Contributing to the body of scholarship on the subject of education is one of the ways I would like to use what I have learned to generate change. My studies in the field of Literacy have highlighted the complicated relationships between education, social mobility, and the individual. I hope to use this knowledge and the tools I have gathered not only to be the best teacher I can be, but to address the issues perpetuated by a problematic educational system.