My Teaching Philosophy
My teaching methods emphasize rhetorical awareness, information literacy, and attention to the composing process. I want to affirm that students shape and direct the institution they inhabit and recognize how they are already imbued in social significance before they enter my class—in other words, I aim to value who they already are, not just what they produce. My classroom time is often spent fostering inductive thinking and exploration. Students propose their own topics in response to explorative initial prompting, and then in groups develop their work in shared drafts and research. I meet with them in conferences throughout the semester to talk to them about drafts they are in the middle of developing. I find joy in class sessions that are abuzz with interactivity—feels like a former career, in a newsroom.
In creative and expository contexts, I prize lowering the bar for entering into the development of a project, then steadily raising expectations. I want the class to praise and invigorate drafting and planning, and for students to name how they compose. I prefer to workshop partially completed pieces—adding a tangibility to the workshop format.
I try to tap into the ways that students already make associations and think critically in spaces that appeal to them, where they already communicate, ask questions, navigate information, and find joy. In an era of so-called fake news, I often infuse some theme of information or digital literacy into the course, and ask students to interrogate past sponsors of their own learning.
As someone with chronic pain from an invisible disability, I remember the difficulties of teachers who were unempathetic to what I was going through, and sometimes imposed onto me negative characteristics—robbing me of a narrative I was trying to construct of myself. As an instructor I hope to do better by my students than that, and try to subvert pedagogies of fear—fear of expressing a need for accommodation or incorporation, for example—that have adled traditional classroom discourse and student-teacher power relations.
Additionally, with an understanding of the potential damages that test-centric high school curricula have imposed upon many of my CUNY students, I remind my students that they are not their grades. I focus my assessment on revision and responding to feedback, instead of grading them solely on what they can already accomplish by the time I meet them. Over time, I have developed an assessment model that emphasizes actionable tasks and rewards students for their reflective participation in the writing process. That model is in-part informed by the work of labor-based grading model advocates like Asao Inoue or Jane Danielewicz & Peter Elbow. I use assignment-specific rubrics that heavily prioritize participation in revision, and make all points recoverable (samples of my assignment and assessment models available upon request).
I have found success in an epistolary dialogue with students; I write them letters and ask for letters in return about their process and goals, and I think this helps them trust me to take their ideas seriously.
I consider writing a fundamentally imaginative exercise no matter the subject—including or especially when situated in an expository writing setting. I like to dispel emergent myths of drudgery associated with “comp” courses (the first one being at Harvard, then diverging into various approaches) and celebrate a century of attention to process over product in the study of writing.
Some creative and critical speculation helps. In some courses, I’ve used semester-long projects of embodiment. In a “writing across the disciplines” course at John Jay College, for example, we followed a semester-long conceit that student groups were production studios putting together documentary pilots in need of research—which afforded creative inquiry through different genres of scholarship (historical, sociological, scientific). Their rhetorical analysis essay became a means to scout the competition. We called the course “Project Greenlight,” and I brought in film critics to respond to their ideas. Ultimately what they wrote fit right into the curriculum: research, analytical, and multimodal writing. These kinds of layered applications, exposing the ways in which, though we may not all become professional writers, writing has a role in nearly everything people do.
I prioritize amusement and fellowship. I offer asynchronous and synchronous options for expressing student presence each week, undermining the paranoia that can disrupt the teacher-student dialogic when students (or teachers!) are absent for real, complicated, difficult-to-explain reasons. I ask students what they like, while at the same time separating preference from analysis. I seek to broach realities that students want to understand, communities that students actually come from (and how to speak to them), ways that students want to be heard and to hear, and the lives and feelings that students want to have.
Writing instructors help students realize individual vocabulary for reality, to make it more liveable and vibrant. Writing instruction has the potential to help students foster their identities and find how they are suspended in a set of discursive spaces, recognize those spaces, and navigate new ones.
Sample Courses
I tend to build digitally native courses, most recently via Baruch Colleges WordPress platform, Blogs@Baruch. My students generally build their own sites, and I give them feedback (and they conduct peer review) via the hypothes.is social annotation platform.
