Dominique C Bourg Hacker

Biography

Teaching Philosophy
I am passionate about working with writers, and I have spent the last 16 years teaching writing, tutoring writers, editing manuscripts, collaborating on proposals, and designing collegiate writing curriculum.

My goal as a writing instructor is to make the writing process more transparent. By calling attention to the rhetorical context of business writing, I ask students to critically assess the needs of their audiences and the writing situation. Understanding the diverse contexts of business writing, allows students to recognize the difference between academic and business writing, and learn adaptive and responsive approaches to writing in the workplace. Collaborative writing and workshopping are main features of my classroom. In giving and receiving feedback from each other as well as writing together, students engage a broader range of approaches to assigned writing tasks, get practice making writing choices considering their audience, and learn how to articulate the reasoning for their writing choices.

While the main focus of my classroom is to practice workplace communication, I also include classroom activities that help students think critically about the accepted standards of communication in the workplace that might privilege certain identities. Trained as a postcolonial theorist, I underscore the role dominant culture has in shaping knowledge and space.

Research Interests
Digital and Web Literacy, Multimodal writing, Decolonial Methodologies and Pedagogies, Intertextual Writing Practices