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Welcome to Andrew Pilsch’s Webpage

Andrew Pilsch is a lecturer at The Pennsylvania State University . His research focuses on the rhetorical history and legacy of cybernetics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with specific interest in science fiction, emerging media, poststructuralism, and postmodernism.

He currently teaches composition courses for the English Department at Penn State that make use of a range of digital technologies, including wikis.

CV

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Teaching

Teaching Experience

The Pennsylvania State University, University Park

  • Rhetoric & Composition ( 6 Sections ) — This first-year composition option at Penn State introduces students to college writing, critical thinking, and basic rhetorical theory.
  • Effective Writing: Technical Writing ( 5 Sections ) — Advanced composition class for students in science and engineering fields. Focus on document design, readability, and technologies of communication.
  • Effective Writing: Business Writing ( 2 Sections ) — Advanced composition class for students in business fields. Focus on effective and ethical communication, document design, and branding.
  • Science Fiction ( 2 Sections ) — Course focusing on the history of science fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries. This large lecture class, composed mostly of non-majors, highlights the ongoing relationships between science, literature, and imagined futures.
  • Introduction to Critical Reading ( 1 Section ) — Introductory class focusing on research methods and critical approaches within the English major. Specifically, instruction focused on media theory and critical appraisal of cultural texts.

Teaching Philosophy

“His dream was not so much to give a lecture to humans as to provide a program for pure computers.” – Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

My goals in teaching classes in both rhetoric and literature are intimately connected with my research interests. In my dissertation, I write about “transhumanism,” a discursive community aimed at grappling with humans as objects of ongoing evolutionary processes. Often, these evolutionary processes have, specifically, to do with the evolutionary pressures exerted by new and emerging, digital technologies. As such, my motivation as a teacher is to better equip my students to deal with these pressures. Overall, I view my teaching as a chance to direct students in ways of living in a digital media ecology and preparing them for a future of ongoing, accelerating technological change.

This goal expresses itself differently, depending on the class being taught. For instance, in teaching Technical Communication, which I have done four times so far, I made an interesting discovery regarding my students and their attitudes towards writing. In conducting classroom discussion, I found that, thanks to Penn State’s various internship and co-op programs, my students mostly had experience writing in a professional, scientific capacity. What they lacked, however, was basic knowledge of digital document production. As such, I’ve retooled my teaching of this subject to focus on combining content production and document design. In this fashion, students spend as much time focusing on how they write as on what they write. The class includes assignments in both report writing and webpage design. I find that students benefit more from this approach, as they can leave my course with marketable, new media skills in addition to a better understanding of the rhetorical stakes of technical writing. More importantly, I stress the importance of developing digital problem solving strategies, rather than specific tool use, so that students in my classes can be better prepared for a changing, evolving digital workplace.

My teaching of science fiction, which is a new experience for me, affords another opportunity for dealing pedagogically with the tenants of transhumanism. Where the technical communications classroom becomes a workshop for applied transhumanism, I view the science fiction classroom as focusing on the philosophical implications of this discourse. By focusing on close analysis of various texts that grapple with the nature of a radically altered future, I attempt to direct students toward thinking seriously about the ethical, moral, and philosophical issues raised by the rapid technological change experienced by the United States following World War II (which corresponds to the high point of American SF). Additionally, as many of these processes of change and acceleration are ongoing (especially with regards to emerging Internet technologies and mobile computing), I view science fiction pedagogy as an opportunity to raise my students’ awareness that the issues raised in SF are, increasingly, being raised in their lives and their futures.

In both of these cases, I find focusing on the ongoing evolution of the human condition, by viewing my pedagogy from a transhuman perspective, both personally rewarding and hugely beneficial to my students in the classroom and beyond. While also helping them learn the course material at hand, my transhuman perspective allows students to step out of the classroom and the university with highly valuable “take-away” skills that can be applied in their future lives as students and as professionals. As such, I look forward to continue to explore this perspective in new and exciting pedagogical environments.

Research

Research Interests

Andrew Pilsch is a researcher interested in the rhetorical history and philosophical legacy of cybernetics. This overarching interest feeds into many of his current projects in a number of ways.

His current project follows the rhetorical history of transhumanism through a wide range of cultural texts and argues that this ongoing discussion of humanity as an object of evolutionary processes can be understood in terms of a rhetorical trope I call ``evolutionary futurism’‘. Evolutionary futurism is any discussion of humanity in terms of what it might become in the future through natural selection. In tracing this trope beginning in the philosophical explorations of life, power, and evolution during modernism, I suggest that transhumanism renders the twentieth-century as an ongoing attempt to imagine futures in which humanity becomes something beyond the limits imposed by Cartesian humanism. While the contemporary movement calling itself ``Transhumanism’‘ sees this evolutionary change being brought about by technological and chemical enhancement of the body, I use a broad definition of ``evolution’‘ (including mental and spiritual enlargement) to show that discourses such as schizoanalysis, theosophy, psychedelics, and science fiction contribute to the transhuman project. In doing so, I reveal that transhumanism and the rhetoric of evolutionary futurism provide a central organizing principle for much of twentieth and twenty-first century thought.

Graduate Seminars Taken

Spring 2009

Fall 2007

Spring 2007

Fall 2006

Spring 2006

Fall 2005

Digital Portfolio

Web Gallery | Classroom Resources | Print Gallery | Portfolio Main

Andrew Pilsch's Portfolio

Welcome to my digital portfolio.

This website is intended as documentation of my experiences with digital technology, especially as these experiences relate to my research and my pedagogy . I include a number of documents that illustrate my use of digital technologies in the classroom and as part of my pedagogical service.

For ease of use, I have divided the examples into three categories:

  • Web Gallery — This gallery documents several websites I have created for classroom, personal, and service needs during my time at Penn State .

  • Classroom Resource Gallery — This gallery displays sample syllabuses from classes I have created that stress the role of digital technology in the composition classroom and several instructional aids I have used in writing classes.

  • Print Gallery — As part of my professional service while a graduate student at Penn State , I designed a number of fliers for speakers coming to campus. I compile them in this gallery.