Teaching Philosophy

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I recognize that students are entering classrooms in a time where many are living and dealing in the wake of the Covid-19 global pandemic and the recurrence of anti-Black violence, xenophobia, transphobic legislation and attacks, and reduction in many people’s reproduction rights and care. Black feminist scholar, Aisha K. Finch notes that we are living in a “crisis of care,” where the pandemic made visible inequalities to care and access for many communities (1). Thus, my teaching philosophy is best encapsulated by the words of bell hooks: “As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.” This reflects my commitment to facilitating learning, building classroom communities, and centering care. 

Care in my classrooms means building communities that emphasize flexibility, humanity, empathy, and encouraging students to approach projects and assignments from a place of reflection. With these perspectives in mind, I view my courses as a space to break down assumptions about writing and reading and affirm their relevance in our lives. In my composition courses, both online asynchronous and synchronous, I begin each semester by asking students to reflect on their writing history and experiences. Using an online discussion board modality and a word-cloud generator, I ask students to write about their relationship with writing. Helping students locate writing in their lives is the basis for their caring more deeply about it. To further demonstrate the relevance of writing, I present rhetoric as a tool to investigate writing in students’ lives. For instance, in my composition courses, we explore how various examples of writing, ranging from essays, advertisements, TikToks, and AI-generated content, are critically constructed through specific meaning-making strategies for targeted audiences. We then use rhetorical theories to determine how writers advance their messages and influence the perspectives of others. As the semester progresses, students practice and produce writing samples, applying their work with rhetorical concepts by using them to make informed decisions about their projects.

I also encourage students to actively explore their individual communities and experiences and how these shape who they are and contribute to their identities as writers. In my fall 2023 Multimodal Writing and Digital Literacy course, students explored their histories through an activity based on George Ella Lyon and Julie Landsman’s “I Am From” poetry project. Students created a list of 10-14 moments, vignettes, memories, items, places, or people they feel are important to their identity. Students then wrote and designed a digital or physical poem of 10-14 lines from their list. The purpose of this assignment was to introduce students to the term “positionality” and how this influences writing, and practice multimodal composition in a low-stakes, creative activity. 

Prioritizing Tema Okun’s call for higher education to move away from “worship of the written word,” which she notes is a “symptom of white supremacy culture,” my courses feature a blend of discussion, reflection, making, and writing assignments. Incorporating a broad range of modes and digital tools, critical-making assignments enable my students to design accessible digital projects that use the affordances of different media to critique and promote solutions for urgent social issues. For example, in my fall 2023 Digital Writing and Multimodal Literacy course, students read Angela M. Haas’ groundbreaking work, “Wampum as Hypertext,” and then created their own physical “hypertext” using their “digits.” Students created an object that conveyed a specific message that could relate to their identity, their community, their passions, their family, or chosen family. I then asked students to write a 500-word maker’s statement explaining the construction of their object, the meaning-making strategies they employed and what their interpretation meant to them. My critical making assignments challenge students to reconceive traditional understandings of writing, teaching them to multimodally communicate, consider universal design principles and Design Justice to promote accessibility, and develop digital literacies.

My courses also encourage students to critique systems of power and interrogate the intersections of ability, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social class, and race in historical and contemporary media. For instance, in my Writing about Myth, Media, and Memory course, I paired discussions about LGBTQ+ and racial representation in fairytales and media with Emma Donoghue’s Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins and Kalynn Bayron’s YA Dystopian novel Cinderella is Dead. Students extended our investigations of the links between underrepresentation, discrimination, and racism through a multimodal making activity that asked them to consider and physically create/craft a world or character they wish to see represented in fairytale-inspired media. 

I promote student agency and critical inquiry by incorporating assignment choices and student-led small-group and whole-class discussions. In both my Survey of World Literature: Ancient to Renaissance and Survey of English Literature 1750-Present courses, students participated in panel presentations and discussions, simulating the format of a professional conference panel, with 2-3 of their peers. They prepared a one-page statement in response to a text and topic, circulated their statements before the class, and participated in a Q&A session following the panel. The panel presentations invite students to be active collaborators who participate in knowledge production, articulate their diverse perspectives on challenging issues, and practice engaging in conversations with their peers.

My courses give students opportunities for professional development and emphasize the practical application and transfer of theoretical concepts and skills beyond the classroom. For example, I bring in guest speakers who have industry experience to provide networking opportunities for students and connect students with authentic experiences outside of the classroom. I also use my privilege and knowledge about publishing to write and publish with students. In my previous courses, I have also partnered with the UF Smathers Library Rare Book Collection to give students hands-on experience visiting the library, practice doing archive-based research, and opportunities to read underrepresented materials, writers, and artists. Through this partnership, my students have viewed zines from queer, feminist activist Caroline Paquita/Pegacorn Press’ collection Ride The Wild Ride (2014), comics such as Black Panther, and 19th and 20th-century abolitionist scrapbooks. 

I seek to teach and promote equity in the classroom through diverse materials and approaches. As a white, English-speaking scholar and teacher, I acknowledge that some students may not always feel comfortable sharing their stories with me. This means respecting the stories and identities of students, recognizing that many experience or will experience barriers that I will not, and being aware of my responses to them. As an educator, my priority is to create an inclusive, safe, accessible, and innovative classroom that affords students the opportunity to critically learn, analyze, and care.