Learning is for the most part habit-formation, and a direct result of goal-directed practice and feedback. Over the past 20 years, I have seen such learning take place in diverse contexts, from Professional Communication classrooms, where students learn to entering disciplinary discourse, to professional development workshops, where faculty learn to align course outcomes to instruction, and even in soccer practices, where players learn to execute a tactical combination play.
I have been on the “teaching” end in all these contexts, attempting to awaken possibilities to my students, so that they learn how to apply the skills they have mastered (or are in the process of mastering) in appropriate situations. For such a model of mastery to be enacted, a good understanding of the relationship between principles that govern the discipline or activity and their localized application is necessary, which is exactly where my formal training in Rhetoric has been critical: having the tools to analyze audiences, purposes and contexts allows me to help students learn how to respond to a diverse set of complex problems.
Perhaps this is why I find it equally fascinating to be teaching Proposal Writing, Public Oral Discourse, Data Visualization or Human-Computer Interaction Design: at the heart of it all is my desire to help students learn how solve problems using words.