TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

In a contemporary world—and education system—marked by such polarization and fracture, it is my deeply-held belief that education is the vital foundation of a democratic society. If anything, the last six years in the U.S. have only reified this position. Critical thinking, rhetorical awareness, and meaningful discourse are crucial skills for students to develop, especially as the use of AI and Large Language Models has proliferated both in and out of the academy. Inspired primarily by bell hooks’ landmark Teaching to Transgress, I try to meet each student where they are in their individual educational journey and avoid a “rote, assembly-line approach” to learning. As such, my philosophy of teaching is shaped by the development and use of critical praxis and a commitment to inclusivity and social equity, all of which are undergirded by the principles of critical and emancipatory pedagogies.

My teaching style prioritizes a student-centered approach to learning wherein I challenge students to be active participants in shaping their own education. This is often initially met with confusion or frustration, but working to have students recognize the power and value of their own voices and experiences is truly transformative. To work toward that goal, I structure class meetings to prioritize student engagement by implementing democratic classroom practices such as collective decision making and student agency. Classes often begin with student-led discussion in order to immediately address material with which they may be struggling, so that as we move forward they are building from more solid foundations of knowledge. My lectures incorporate digital media and interactivity to increase engagement, which I often follow with in-class work that connects course material to a process or practice. This approach has three main benefits: first, it helps students synthesize material and make connections with broader ideas and course objectives; second, it gives students the chance to work through areas in which they are struggling in a space where they can get real-time feedback and support from both peers and the instructor; and third, it contributes to community building in the classroom, which over time opens space for vulnerability—a crucial quality in a classroom when students are composing and/ or grappling with complex ideas. I also incorporate an ongoing discussion of metacognition within the subject material in order to foreground not merely what students are learning, but to also develop their awareness of how they are learning; this encourages students to develop their understanding of themselves as agents in their own academic journey. No matter the course topic, my curricula are driven by the accumulation and application of critical praxis as a means of helping students advance as analytical thinkers, rhetorical actors, and persuasive writers. Prioritizing critical praxis helps students develop an awareness of their own agency as learners and thinkers and gives them tools with which to recognize and interrogate systems that uphold power. An emphasis on rhetorical analysis is one of the key ways I enact and encourage critical praxis; it gives students a solid toolkit for identifying persuasive agendas in the texts and media they encounter, as well as giving them a framework with which to build and develop their own argumentative voice.

Although my course design necessarily differs depending on the topic and level of the course, there are a few throughlines in my pedagogical approach that I have found work well with my teaching style. Good readers make good writers, so I work with students not only to improve their writing, but also to read critically and deeply, engaging with a wide variety of texts in differing media—literature, journalism, podcasts, video essays, documentary, and more all offer different rhetorical approaches and devices that we can then evaluate and dissect as a class. As such, I ask students to keep a reading journal that not only briefly summarizes each text but also asks students to connect these texts with ideas they have encountered elsewhere, engage with parts they may not fully understand or for which they lack context, and to pose a few questions or points of discussion for the class. These journal assignments are beneficial in several ways: first, they are specific enough (and the assigned texts varied enough) that they are not easily written with ChatGPT or other AI tools; second; it gives students a lot of practice writing, but within lower-stakes assignments where they are more likely to take chances; and third, it prepares them for class discussion, not only by ensuring that they read the text but by also asking them to prepare for our class dialogue about it. This lower stakes writing also gives me a chance to intervene where necessary before the higher stakes of the essay assignments. In writing-focused courses, I also emphasize writing as a process, one which is necessarily both iterative and revisionary, so I always offer students the chance to submit drafts prior to the due date as well as to revise their essays. This gives students agency while also helping alleviate some of the intense grade anxiety to which students often subject themselves.

Over time, I have been able to hone the ways my classroom practices address individual student needs, and thus I am able to more effectively help students who have been educationally underserved due to socioeconomic background, systemic racism, gender or sexuality discrimination, or systems of ableism. I have been fortunate enough to teach in minority-majority classrooms as well as with a wide variety of demographics, including first-generation students, English-language learners, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, students from underserved socioeconomic backgrounds, and refugees. Working with these diverse student populations has repeatedly shown me how educational systems often fail these students, largely by ignoring them. My focus on classroom equity takes into account the specific needs of individual students rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach to the curriculum. I center students’ experiences and goals, both academic and professional, in order to best connect them with the specific tools and support systems that can ensure their success. Semester after semester, I have watched students who began the term as indifferent or even hostile toward the course material grow as thinkers and writers and mature as scholars because they have, as one student told me, “felt seen and heard” in my classroom.

Ultimately, by prioritizing the tenets of emancipatory pedagogy, my goal is to create a communal, equitable space in which students can both achieve course objectives and also confront the systems of power that structure society and shape their experience within it. In doing so, I empower students to recognize the value in their own experience and knowledge, and I hold space for students to actively engage with the messy processes of writing and critical engagement. I strive for students to leave my class with not only a deeper understanding of the subject matter, but also a sense of themselves as an agent in their own education as well as the skills to more effectively communicate in the variety of contexts they will encounter, both in academia and the world at large.