Teaching Statement: 2025-2026

Writing is how we articulate experiences, negotiate identity, and connect with the communities that matter to us. I believe that students arrive in my classroom already doing this work: they code-switch across platforms and social contexts, navigate discourse communities, and make sophisticated rhetorical choices outside the classroom daily. My job is not to introduce students to writing, but help them recognize the literacies they already possess, examine the systems shaping them, and to refine their critical awareness to feel confident expressing their own identity, literacies, languages, and power. My First-Year Composition course design and my thinking about writing tools—including generative AI—builds from these beliefs.

Drawing on Shipka’s (2011) expanded conception of multimodality, I treat writing as one literacy among many. The students I work with analyze how meaning is made across platforms and modes, moving between traditional essays, social media content, visual arguments, and community publications. Understanding how incongruent forms work rhetorically helps students marshal their multiple literacies—speaking, listening, reading, multilingual writing, and multimodality—in support of their own writing processes and goals. When I teach visual rhetoric, students bring in artifacts that already matter to them: album art, video games, concert flyers, family photos. We develop shared vocabulary for discussing composition, audience, and rhetorical choice by starting from what students already read critically, even if they don’t yet call it that.

Likewise, I’ve developed Twine-based interactive lectures for my courses where peer groups navigate branching pathways that embed content, structured discussion, application tasks and synthesize their perspectives for the class. Writing is not exclusively linear, and neither is learning. I assign a collaborative zine project that draws from my background in DIY print culture and Devitt’s (1993, 2009) framework of critical genre awareness. This assignment asks students to write, design, and physically assemble a publication together based on their responses to Bad Ideas About Writing to produce a writing artifact that circulates beyond the classroom and belongs to them collectively, while practicing the navigation of choices and constraints that writing for specific audiences, genres, and purposes requires. I am currently developing an open-source browser-based tool to make this project accessible to students without design software. I treat language diversity as a resource the curriculum should be designed around. I encourage students to brainstorm and develop ideas in the language that allows them to think most clearly, and I actively create space for code-meshing in discussion and early drafting. This isn’t accommodation but aligns with Pimentel and Dean’s (2016) argument that students’ right to their own language is not in tension with developing academic literacy but foundational to it. This conviction shapes how I approach generative AI. The most important distinction I ask students to develop is between AI as prosthetic access and AI as cognitive replacement. A multilingual student who uses an LLM to translate a brainstorm from their first language into English is using a tool to participate in a linguistic context that was not designed with them in mind. I understand accommodation not as an exception to how language works but as a condition of it—all communication involves prosthetics, and the question is always which ones we sanction and for whom. Prompting an LLM to draft an argument the student hasn’t yet developed, on the other hand, substitutes the tool’s pattern-matching for the recursive, reflective work that makes writing a site of genuine intellectual growth. My course AI policy requires transparency, uses Duck.AI as a privacy-grounded platform that prevents student data from training commercial models, and includes a simple chat export that helps to evaluate AI usage.

My courses are structured around iterative, scaffolded work because revision is where genuine thinking happens. Each major assignment—Multimodal Literacy Narrative, Textual Analysis of a Literacy Practice, Revise and Remediate, ePortfolio—moves students through multiple drafts, reading summaries, structured free writes, and peer review before final submission. One mandatory one-on-one conference each semester creates space for conversations that don’t happen well in writing or in the classroom: about flexibly adapting processes to support individual goals, about what a student is actually trying to say, and about acting with intention on feedback. The ePortfolio isn’t a final collection; students check in three times across the term, building and revising their reflective framework as their understanding develops.

The reading sequences in my courses make theoretical grounding legible through material students can enter from multiple directions. A unit on language identity moves from Gloria Anzaldúa’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” to Chi Luu on Appalachian English to Louis De Paor on Irish language loss, asking students to read colonial language politics across contexts that are geographically unique but structurally related. A unit on genre and performance uses 90s techno-pop performance artists, the KLF to ask what counts as composition, what disruption communicates, and who gets to define legitimate rhetorical participation. These choices are designed to make the course’s central questions—who gets to write, in what language, for whom—feel genuinely urgent.

My forthcoming contributions to ePortfolios: A Guide for Writers (2026) and my theoretically grounded framework for teaching with and against generative AI. My goal for every student is a way of asking questions: about how texts are constructed, about what systems shape who gets to mean something, and about their own capacity to use language with intention and care.