Stephen J. Quigley is an artist, writer, and a 2023-2024 David Mascaro Faculty Lecturer in Sustainability. In addition to craft theory and design, his research interests include digital rhetoric and basic coding. He earned his PhD in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design from Clemson University and teaches in the Digital Narrative and Interactive Design (DNID) Program at the University of Pittsburgh. His courses include technical communications, digital composing, integrating writing and design, digital narrative and interactive design, project-based design courses, and usability studies. He designed Open Fuego web tools to help educators and students integrate code into their classroom activities. His tools and pedagogy feature prominently in a 2023 National Science Foundation (NSF) Computer Science for All (CSforALL) Grant. He is a Pitt Cyber affiliate scholar and serves on the Senate Computing Committee.
digital projects
Open Fuego
Coding Tools
My Nature Study
Multimodal Nature Study Tool
basic coding
Article in Kairos 26.2 2022
[Un]disciplining Environmental Education
Multimodal Installation / Film Project
Observing Rhetoric in Resilient Stagnant Ecologies
Dissertation Design Project: 360 Degree Film
Clemson Geopaths Rhetor in Residence
NSF funded project facilitating experiential learning opportunities for non-geoscience majors.
Grad 360 Digital Literacy Project
Digital literacy curriculum designer
GIS in the Composition Classroom
Computers and Composition Online
Welcome to the Letters of Anna Calhoun
Kairos, 22.2
The Electrate Grandmother
Designing Rituals: Making as Therapy
The Better Clemson App
First-year Composition Multimodal Project
The Legacies of Fort Hill
Film Project
teaching
I am fortunate to work with students in a creative environment where we learn new things and design cool stuff. I find students at the University of Pittsburgh particularly interesting and I am ever amazed by their interests, intelligence, passion, and willingness to learn new things. If I can create a learning environment that encourages students to leverage what we do in class towards their own ends, then I can guarantee positive learning outcomes.
In my technical communications classes we focus on technical writing, writing architectures, project management, digital tool learning, and design strategies that my students employ while working with others to create deliverables. In my digital design-centered courses, I draw on post-structural invention methods to encourage creativity, UX methods and design thinking to ground our work in method, and a studio environment where students work together to learn tools, techniques, and revise their work. I've also taught a range of other courses including first-year writing, professional communication, usability testing, courses housed in the school of education, independent research projects, and graduate independent readings exploring critical making methods/pedagogy.
craft
As a designer and woodworker with some twenty years of experience, I can’t help but see the teaching of writing as craft. To learn a craft, one must first learn the feel of their tools, in my case the edge of the blade in relation to the stock. Of equal importance is reading the stock and how it wants to be worked, so as not to tear away at it, and the idea behind the design. Tools needs to be tested. And in so doing a student begins to assemble the appropriate knowledge of knowing-making, which results in skill. This Aristotelian concept is not a linear one. Knowledge does not always inform making or doing. In fact, sometimes it is the other way around. That is, through practice, we begin to form theory, which in turn informs subsequent practice. The teaching of craft always involves scaffolding. After a student learns one tool those skills are transferred to the next, and new theories are formed and tested for each process so as to effect a consistent product. Inevitably, the student learns that there are many ways of accomplishing an intended outcome. A skilled craftsperson, however, understands when to apply a given tool to achieve a specific outcome in particular situation.
knowing making doing
Pitt Fuego
Coding Tools
Open Fuego offers open-source coding templates for a variety of occasions, and everyday tools that you can use for presentations and portfolios. You'll develop computational thinking and learn the basics of coding and computer science.
My Nature Study is a coding template offering students an opportunity to work with tools to construct meaning in their world. Along the way, students will learn essential computer science concepts and develop skills communicating their findings to others.
In a UI-driven design world, we cannot overstate the anxiety many individuals experience when encountering code. If we wish to promote any form of coding literacy at scale, our earliest attempts will need to address these fears. This webtext introduces the pedagogy of basic coding and Open Fuego, a tool designed to help educators easily integrate aspects of coding literacy, computational thinking, and computer science knowledge into the rhetoric and composition classroom.
Working with our Finnish partners at the University of Helsinki, we observed a number of sites of environmental engagement in both informal and formal settings. We spent time at three Nature Schools around Helsinki observing students learning in nature, interviewing teachers and education policy experts, with the goal of better understanding the relationship between Nature Schools, the local communities they serve, and the kinds of impact they might have in establishing policy. The result is this film project.
We hope that by learning about the (un)disciplining of environmental education in Finland, our audience will reflect on the role our schools might play in fostering ones relationship with nature and using learning in nature as a method towards addressing our own environmental challenges.
Observing Rhetoric Function in Resilient Stagnant Ecologies
360-degree film
An ecological framework reminds us that our greater design informs our present, be it a present-past or a present-future orientation. This project utilizes 360-degree camera and virtual reality technology as a tool for writing a specific networked ecology, unconcealing the design of a territorialized space, but also affording the interlocutor a degree of play.
NSF-funded project design to build an affective pathway into the geosciences
Clemson Geopaths Project Rhetor in Residence. This NSF-funded project was design to build an affective pathway into the geosciences through experiential learning for non-geoscience majors. As part of this project, I organized and facilitated STEM Communication Events organized around central campus spaces.
Grad 360 Digital Literacy Projet
Curriculum Designer
Grad 360°’s Digital Literacy Project centers around matriculating Clemson graduate students and seeks to foster five core technology-focused learning competencies: digital storytelling, audio-based community building, video-mediated teaching, academic poster/web-accessible PDF presenting, and web-based information design and publishing. While the practical aim of this digital learning curriculum is to help students acquire new digital tools, its philosophical intent is to position digital literacy as a conduit through which students gain a richer experience with their campus and scholarly communities, engage in professional development through Grad 360°’s Tiger 9 core skills, and wrestle with their own identities as graduate students at Clemson University. Thus, rather than focusing on students becoming experts in digital platforms, this project emphasizes the metacognitive aspects of learning new technologies: how knowledge transfers from one situation to the next, why mentor texts are needed, and where knowledge can be supplemented through networked communities online.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) allow the user to visualize and display geographic data. This web project details my implementation of Esri Survey 1-2-3 and Esri ARC GIS (a proprietary GIS system offered through the Esri Company) in a FYC (first-year composition classroom). The class used GIS to build smart maps and web applications for visualizing and analyzing data. The project offered a challenge to students to collect and analyze geographic data in order to tell stories and formulate arguments linking space, place, time, and rhetoric. Visualizing this collected data allows the researcher to consider the rhetorical implications of space and place. I argue that by implementing this methodology, my students come to know rhetorics as a grammar for our relationality in space and place at a given time.
This project challenges the dominant narrative a state university uses to describe its namesake. The project curates a selection of primary source documents set in juxtaposition to myriad other texts, images, and videos, all working in conjunction to complicate the scene of learning at this university and in this state.
For me, making is a ritual act, an electrate wandering, an exploration of choral space, "the mediating space that coordinates the inner void, nothing, openness" (Ulmer). For me, the choric space, the workings and unworkings of flow, allow a time of focus/wandering, risk/safety, forgetting/knowing. What happens when we create using the fodder of personal tragedy? This is the guiding question of my electric grandmother project.
In this collaborative project, my students created an interactive scavenger hunt with 4-5 chapters for a give user to explore. Individual groups designed and built each of the chapters which were then linked together into a unified challenge. The goal of the Better Clemson App is to transform the user from actor to agent by creating a game forcing the user to move around the campus to both see problems first hand and to offer that user a chance to make changes to improve our campus spaces and places.
Ulmer's Textshop Experiments, Vol 2, Tours and Detours
The Konsult is a natural outcome of electrate discourse in that it allows egents to express themselves within new media and digital modes without being constrained by the boundaries of orality and literacy. Similar to the way that Plato used dialogue in his Academy, electracy uses the Konsult within the digital apparatus. Our project team combined archival research, rhetorical analysis, and digital production to create a Konsult calling attention to the multiple histories to help transform the rhetorical memorialization of Fort Hill.
