As a teacher, critic and poet, I am interested in a social praxis that engages readers in an enabling dialectic of discovery with texts. I believe that language is a meaning-making object in itself, not a transparent veil through which we peer at the objects and concepts of the world. As such, I believe that all rhetorical occasions—at every level—are political in nature. I encourage students to think of writing as a continuing process, not as a singular, instantaneous "performance." During each fluid stage through which every developing writer must pass, I find it important to meet each student at his or her own level of interest and ability. I strive in my student-centered classroom to furnish participants with practical strategies and information to enable them to continue moving toward the desired goal of empowerment through language.

In my workshops, I discuss with my students the ways in which the ability to read with rhetorical sensitivity creates the possibility of wresting power away from our oppressors, often in the process exposing some of their more sinister objectives. Through a command of rhetoric and analysis, I want my students to learn to see how those in power (what Louis Althusser calls the "ideological state apparatus") continually create a variety of texts, often by means of an ethically compromised use of rhetoric, to work against us all, appealing to our sense of aesthetic pleasure at the expense of appealing to our reason. These appeals to pleasure, more often than not, can be turned into a means of strengthening, justifying, or concealing an agent's hidden agenda. As such, it would oblige my students to recognize the possibility that the primary function of written communication has often been to facilitate a master-slave relationship between authors and audiences, between those who sell the material of consciousness and those who, too often without question, buy it.

With the stakes being so very high, students in my classes learn to wake up to a world of words. In each of my courses, my students learn to deconstruct all manner of texts, learning better to take note of, experiment with and analyze form.

My students explore practical strategies with which to interrogate the texts of quotidian experience as we together examine how argument, rhetorical analysis, critical thinking and aesthetics are inextricably linked to political power. As my students face the challenges ahead on their paths of discovery into the 21st century, in addition to finding that their sense of preparation for the rest of their academic work has greatly increased, I hope that students, upon leaving my classes, will use their newly honed skills of analysis, persuasion and creation to truthful ends.