Teaching
Teaching Philosophy
Drawing to Learn
“In my classroom, I want students to feel comfortable making bad writing. I want them to loosen up, embrace failure. I want them to play. To take risks.
I ask students to compose with modes, tools, and genres they’re not used to. When students try out things they haven’t done before, it destabilizes them. But that’s where the learning happens.”
This multimodal text uses drawing as a frame for the way I define my pedagogy. It assembles drawings, writing, and student work to present my teaching philosophy.
Courses
Sample First-Year Writing Course: Writing Across Borders
This class considers what it means to write across media, languages, and border by considering writing’s role in one of the most contentious crossing points in contemporary American discourse—the US-Mexico border.
Students have the opportunity to practice writing for translation, experiment with what happens to writing in digital spaces as it interacts with other media. Students analyze the rhetoric surrounding contemporary debates surrounding immigration, and use writing-as-activism as they partner with a nonprofit dedicated to migrant rights.
Media Publishing
This course is designed to help students get acquainted with creating digital media texts and better understand how digital media and writing interact. Students learn about digital media by considering media rhetorically—that is, as means of persuasion and tools for getting things done in the world. To sharpen rhetorical and digital media skills, students develop a substantial digital media project—which could be a blog, a magazine, a video, a podcast, a website, or something else—throughout the semester with the aim of creating something ready to publish by the end of the course.
Technical Communication
This course introduces students to the field of technical writing and will helps prepare them for the diverse writing demands that technical writers and professionals encounter across their careers. Through readings, brief lectures, activities, projects, and discussions, the course addresses big questions about context, audience, purpose, and ethics that should be asked in every writing situation. Students practice workplace and scientific genres (reports, proposals, digital communications) and are introduced to key topics in technical communication, including visual and document design, accessibility, usability testing, technical style, and the function and politics of writing technologies
Graduate Seminar in Academic Writing
This five-week seminar is designed to support graduate students from all fields to learn effective habits for academic writing. Through a combination of discussions, peer collaboration, assignments, and individual consultations, students are guided through the process of revising and reworking a writing project, such as a journal article, grant proposal, or dissertation chapter. Students investigate how genre, style, social communities affect professional academic writing and learn strategies for finding effective writing processes, liaising with advisors, and troubleshooting writing problems.
