Ruijie Zhao
Department of Humanities
Parkland College
Introduction
I regard myself as a techno-feminist teacher, an educator who advocates feminist pedagogy and teaches writing with technology. As such, I have strong faith in liberating students’ minds and respecting the knowledge they own and create. I encourage students to speak in an open manner and share their thoughts to create a democratic learning environment with productive dialogues so that class participants, students and the instructor, can learn from one another. Meanwhile, as a new media scholar, I integrate technology in students’ writing processes so that they are prepared to write in the new millennium age. For example, in a developmental writing class I taught, I promoted learning by asking students to use blogs to reflect on their writing processes and share the challenges and accomplishments they experienced while completing the major writing assignments for the course.
This article shares how my ideal feminist learning environment is challenged by developmental writers and how, as a novice developmental educator, I adjusted my teaching practices during the post-writing stage as a means to foster genuine dialogues.