Teaching Philosophy:
Teaching is the cornerstone of my identity as a scholar, professional, and community member. I am particularly conscious of the power of a compassionate and engaged teacher, as someone who was guided from a working class background to community college and through my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees by incredibly insightful and invested teachers. Before returning to the university environment, I taught in secondary and adult education contexts, seeing first-hand how powerful the process of imbuing critical thinking and learning can be for both teacher and students.
My scholarly research interests are rooted in the unique ability of studying the medieval era to challenge common preconceptions and thinking structures. Teaching medieval literature sets the stage for students to question all their presuppositions, and teaching composition gives students the tools to interrogate pre-existing thought and establish their own arguments and understanding.
My commitment, first and foremost, is to fostering student curiosity and critical thinking. To create a learning community where this is as effective as possible, I prioritize the following values:
Collaboration, Student Empowerment, and Shared Authority
My own background and the variety of contexts in which I’ve taught have made it clear to me that, while I have much to offer students, I will never know everything my students know. I bring structured expertise and evidence-based pedagogy to my students as we navigate the material, and in return I offer them the opportunity to explore their own interests and build on the strengths and expertise they bring with them. From day one in my syllabus, I express my commitment to shared authority by informing students of their own agency in choosing research foci and explaining that I will work as a guide but expect them to develop specialized knowledge beyond mine.
In classroom interactions, this principle is evidenced by my willingness and commitment to tell my students when I don’t know the answer to a question, and to model revision of my own stances when new information becomes available. I believe “I don’t know, but I will find out,” are powerful words from an instructor, and can reveal to my students that while they can expect to learn from me, I will also learn from them.
I prefer to teach via discussion, group activities, and Socratic questioning so I can lead my students to developing their own expertise, rather than dominating the space of intellectual authority with excessive lecture. In evaluation and reflection, my students consistently emphasize the value they find in this, with statements like "long lectures become hard to concentrate in – activities such as group reviews or similar activities were nice and broke up the class period nicely" and "discussion and viewing examples of work were most effective [in this class] because we were able to build ideas and incorporate our own thoughts to the projects we were working on." When it comes to assessment and grading, my students and I work together to generate rubrics for each assignment that meet our shared standards for success, and I provide a grading contract where students can decide on the minimum grade they wish to earn and commit to the output that will guarantee that grade, rather than a points-based system. In this, I follow the model presented by Danielewicz and Elbow (2009) and share their desire to "give all students a space that invites internal motivation, not just externally imposed motivation."
Curiosity, Critical Thinking, and Learning as Process
My support of student agency extends beyond their grading; I craft projects and units to allow student choice in topic and format. By providing clear and consistent learning objectives from the syllabus to the daily lesson plan, I show my students that the priority is their skill mastery and allow them to choose the specific materials and topics they will examine as they develop that mastery. In first-year composition, students practice guided composition in multiple genres and modes but organize their writing and course experience around an exploration of a community they identify as home and feel investigative interest in. Their research questions are driven by their own interests and connections, and by the end of the course they express a stronger ability to recognize social and behavioral patterns and critically evaluate not only academic materials, but the world around them. Furthermore, throughout this process we engage in a mutual exercise of trust; I trust that my students' interests and questions have inherent academic potential, and they learn to trust me and their peer workshop groups with places and concepts central to their own identities and understandings of the world.
My courses are a cumulative learning process, but not a linear one. My priority is empowering students to access information in multiple places and modes as they work toward mastery. Just as I model my own ability to adjust to new information, I structure the learning process to allow for recursivity and development. For example, while teaching College Composition and Rhetoric, my students are expected to draft, revise, and then revise again for a final portfolio submission of their assignments, rather than receiving a grade and moving on. When responding to student writing, I frontload my detailed comments to the draft stage in order for my students to benefit most from my direction and recommendations.
Recursivity, revision, and their support of critical thinking skills are foundational not only to the ways I teach composition, but also to my overall ethos and motivation for teaching. I am committed to the disruption of hierarchical cultural hegemonies that place marginalized genders, races, cultures, and socioeconomic classes in subjugation, and the first step in imagining new alternatives is recognizing that norms are not innate, inevitable, nor universal. I strive to teach beyond the status quo of canonical works and scholarly approaches and scaffold each unit with a brief discussion of its intellectual history and how the field arrived at its current stance, with the goal of turning students’ critical eye to how hegemonic norms develop over time.
As a medievalist, I am particularly able to contrast most topics with previous approaches from what students perceive as the distant past, thereby revealing the process and revision of accepted human thought, and this is a powerful exercise in a wide variety of instructional contexts beyond medieval literature. In one particularly memorable instance, I was able to redirect student complaints over gender-inclusive language in an article with this context. When a student expressed their perception that current behavioral expectations were going against a gender binary that “everyone had always known was true,” I was able to redirect and challenge these sentiments without alienating that student by introducing the one-sex understanding of gender held in early modern England. Instead of pitting students against one another or becoming adversarial, we were able to transition to critically assessing social definitions of gender and their origins.
Equity, Accessibility, and the Public Good
I come from communities with members who are intellectually curious and engaged in many forms of learning, though they rarely have access to formal post-secondary education, and these experiences undergird my commitment to accessible and publicly engaged scholarship. My foremost goal for my students’ development is that they develop as citizens and members of various publics, including those beyond the walls of the university. In the classroom, we look beyond our immediate sphere to the non-academic publics that surround us, considering the material we cover in its broader context. When teaching Rhetoric and Composition, we consider each genre of academic writing against a corresponding form from a non-academic discourse community, and I include a composition assignment where students write in a public humanities framework for a non-academic audience. Public engagement guides my own scholarship as well, and my commitment to teaching extends beyond the classroom of university students to the other interested publics I reach through public-facing writing, social media, and community outreach.
Engaging with various publics and prioritizing equity means I am committed to accessibility in my courses. My syllabus sets out my goal of meeting students where they are and fostering their success in personalized ways. I make materials available in multiple formats and strive to make the “hidden curriculum” as visible as possible throughout the learning experience. I am a flexible and encouraging teacher, and I center the learning objectives of my courses to scaffold student progress and support metacognitive reflection on the learning process. My course assignments include reflection and discussion of learning approaches and the academy as well as the taught material. I continue to grow my ability to provide an equitable and accessible learning experience through participation in workshops like SafeZone Ally training and student dialect diversity, and by improving my course materials to align with the Quality Matters higher education rubric and the Universal Design for Learning guidelines.