Associate Professor of English (Rhetoric and Composition)

Teaching Philosophy: 

I am driven by a desire to resist traditional pedagogies that invite students to become merely obedient. Instead, I encourage students to explore through critical writing, reading, and thinking, all of which depends upon my ability to engage students in the work they are doing.

My primary means of helping students to discover joy in writing is investing in projects that ask students to explore and share their personal interests beyond the surface level; this involves helping students learn how to problematize in ways that render what seem to be private interests into problems worthy of shared consideration and meaningful for a variety of audiences. 

Beyond elemental skills in problematizing, I am also aided in my efforts to engage students by my scholarly and professional interest in and knowledge of film, image, and alternative rhetorics. I often use documentary film and filmmaking projects toward these ends because of how documentary film animates key aspects of  nonfiction research for students who may be new to engaging complexly with a problem. That is to say, I use documentary film to compel students to see beyond the generic (institutional) ways of seeing and exploring problems. Students seem to enjoy our work with filmic texts in ways that exceed conventional (print-only) methods.  

More generally, my classes are active and student-centered, which means  that students learn to be more fully accountable for their university-level work.  My classes motivate students to problematize positions in dialogic exchanges that both teach elemental rhetorical knowledge and skill and promote pleasure and excitement as natural components of engaged and communal collaboration, peer mentoring, and (some) negotiation of course aims and texts. Over time, such practices promote students' emergent critical and analytical skills, animating writing and communication practices with increasingly sound reasoning and rhetorical sophistication.

__________________________________________________

Education:

• PhD in Rhetoric and Composition. University of South Florida - 1998
  

Professional Appointments:

• Developing Director, Communication Across the Curriculum Project - 2002-06
• Member: WPA Committee on Best Practices - 2002-03
• Member: UVU General Education committee - 2002-03
• UVU Writing Program Coordinator - 1999-2001; 2005-2007
• Course Coordinator for Honors Composition (ASU) - 1997-1999

Professional Organizations:

• ATAC (Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition)
• CCCC (Conference for College Composition and Communication)
• MLA (Modern Language Association)
• NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English)
• WPA (National Council of Writing Program Administrators)
• Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi

Publications:

books

Negotiating Religious Faith in the Composition Classroom. Co-edited w/ Elizabeth Vander Lei. Portsmouth, NH : Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 2005.

films (in webtexts)

"i'm like ... professional: notes on the film." Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 14.2.<http://www.technorhetoric.net/14.2/topoi/kyburz/index.html>. January, 2010.

“bones” (a short film on multimodality). Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy 12.3. Eds. Cheryl Ball and Scott Lloyd DeWitt. <http://35.9.119.214/12.3/topoi/gallery/index.html>.  May 15, 2008.

articles

“Sundance: (Re)view.” Invited submission for PRE/TEXT 19: 2008. Ed. Victor Vitanza. 34-42.

“‘Totally, Tenderly, Tragically’: Godard's Contempt and the Composition ‘Qu'il y Aurait’ (that Might  Have Been).” Invited submission (peer reviewed) for Composition Studies 36 (1): 2008. 39-55.

“Practica, Symposia, and Other Coercive Acts in Composition Studies.” Don’t Call it That: The Composition Practicum. Ed. Sidney I. Dobrin. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 2005. 67-81.

“Meaning Finds a Way: Chaos (Theory) and Composition.” College English 66 (5): May 2004. 503-523.

review articles

Hawk, Byron. A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity. Invited submission for The Journal of Teaching Writing 25.1. Winter/Spring 2010. 99-103.

“Resisting the ‘Ideology of Certainty’ (or) Thinking about Ways of Reading.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language and Composition 1 (3): Duke U P, 2001. 583-589.

reviews

Newkirk, Thomas. The Performance of Self in Student Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Heinemann, 1997. Composition Studies 30 (1), Spring 2002. 142-145.

Couture, Barbara. Toward a Phenomenological Rhetoric: Writing, Profession, and Altruism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1998. CCC 51 (1), Sept 1999. 132-133.

Shor, Ira.  When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy.  Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1996.  CCC 48 (4), Dec 1997. 588-589.

poetry

“Placebo.” The Louisiana Review (3). Fall 2001. 152.

 

bonnie lenore kyburz home page