Teaching Statement: 2025-2026

My teaching begins with a straightforward belief: students are already writers. They understand rhetoric through the practice from their every day lives—they already adapt their communication for different audiences (home, friends, school, work), navigate genre conventions across platforms (TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.), and likewise make strategic choices about style and tone every day. In my First-Year Composition courses, my job isn’t to teach students how to write but to help them recognize and sharpen the sophisticated literacies they already possess and apply those skills deliberately in their new, academic context. I design my courses around questions of language, identity, and power. My “Our Voices” curriculum asks students to examine how language creates and limits opportunity, how literacy practices are shaped by social and cultural contexts, and how their own voices contribute to the communities they care about. This isn’t abstract theory—it’s grounded in students’ lived experiences with code-switching, digital communication, multilingualism, and navigating different discourse communities.

Making Writing Relatable Through Multimodal Literacy

I treat writing as one literacy among many. Students in my courses analyze how meaning is made across platforms and modes: we examine traditional essays alongside podcasts, social media content, visual arguments, music videos, and community publications. When I teach visual rhetoric, students bring in artifacts that matter to them—album art, video game screenshots, viral tweets, family photos—and we work together to develop vocabulary for discussing composition, audience, and rhetorical choices. This approach recognizes that students already do sophisticated analytical work in the media they consume daily; my job is to help them articulate what they know and transfer those skills across contexts. A concrete example of this philosophy in action is my collaborative zine project. Drawing from my background in punk and metal DIY cultures, I guide students through creating a collectively-produced print publication that showcases their work and builds genuine classroom community. Students write, design, and physically assemble a zine. This project embodies core DIY principles I bring to all my teaching: exercising creativity, embracing process, using creative outlets for connection, demonstrating communal responsibility, and enacting care and support. The zine isn’t busy work—it’s a tangible artifact that demonstrates how writing functions in real communities and gives students ownership over collective production.

Emphasizing Process and Community

I structure my courses around iterative, collaborative work. Students complete multiple drafts for each major assignment, receive detailed feedback from me and peers throughout the process, and revise substantially before final submission. I require two mandatory one-on-one conferences each semester specifically to build face-to-face relationships and discuss students’ work in depth. These conferences aren’t just about workshopping drafts—they’re about professional development, building mentorship relationships, and creating space for conversations that don’t happen well over email.

Preparing Students for Transfer

Everything in my First-Year Composition course builds toward transfer. The four major assignments—Multimodal Literacy Narrative, Textual Analysis of a Literacy Practice, Revise and Remediate, and ePortfolio with Presentation—progressively develop students’ ability to analyze how texts work, make deliberate rhetorical choices, and adapt their writing for different audiences and purposes. By the end of the semester, students leave with more than polished essays; they have practiced metacognitive reflection on their writing processes, responded substantively to feedback, and produced work that demonstrates their understanding of how writing functions in communities beyond the classroom.

Teaching Beyond Composition

While my primary teaching is in First-Year Composition, I bring this same philosophy to courses I’m prepared to teach in literature with comparative focus, digital humanities methods, film and media studies, and visual culture. In all contexts, I emphasize student engagement with material, multiple entry points for learning, and connections between what we study and how meaning circulates in the world. My research background in visual culture, digital methods, and comparative cultural production informs course design that asks students to think across media, across contexts, and across their own experiences.

The Bottom Line

My teaching is guided by the belief that students deserve to understand the systems that shape their communication and to recognize their capacity to participate in those systems critically and creatively. I work to create classrooms where students feel empowered to experiment, to treat mistakes as part of the learning process, and to see their own experiences as valuable sites of knowledge. When students leave my courses, I want them to carry forward not just specific writing techniques but a way of thinking: an awareness of how texts are constructed, how access to literacy shapes opportunity, and how they can use their own voices to contribute to the communities they care about.