Teaching Statement
My classrooms are generative spaces that embrace student voices and encourage thoughtful and confident participation in public conversation. My pedagogy is grounded in awareness that twenty-first century media means students are already power-wielding message-makers daily engaged in civic and communal discourse. Like my research, then, my teaching moves across textual modes and genres. In each of my classes, students are asked to compose traditional academic essays and rhetorical analyses. They are also asked to adapt their writing for genres beyond the classroom that are pertinent to class themes such as newspaper editorials, GoogleMaps, Wikipedia pages, professional design briefs, or formal bureaucratic proposals. Students are exposed to a wide variety of perspectives in my classroom. We recognize all speaking and listening bodies as marked and hold their positions and investments as crucial to understanding public conversations and debates.
I seek to foster in students understanding of their own embodied discursive processes–how, where, and for whom they speak–and the desire to cultivate and hone their practice across traditional, digital, and multimodal media forms. I endeavor to show students how language shapes the world, leveraged positively and negatively by people, nations, and systems to redistribute and renegotiate power and access. Therefore, my classrooms daily ask questions about identity, power, and equity within course-themed texts. In these conversations, we consider pieces’ layered socio-political contexts, their myriad intended and unintended audiences, and students as listening and responding rhetors.