Teaching
My pedagogy is shaped by my experience as a community college student and my struggle to master the hidden curriculum. Like the autodidacts I study in my research, I was largely on my own in deciding what to study and how to navigate the college and university system. It is always my goal, therefore, to impart to my students who may not have family members or friends to help them negotiate higher education (and even those that do) the tools they need to succeed. In instruction, this manifests as transparency and flexibility and in reaching out to those who may not be aware of their options, as I outline in my teaching philosophy. I consider this an extension of universal design -- if we all know how to play the rules of the game, we can all play it better.
Pedagogical Values
Empowerment
Even students from privileged backgrounds struggle to uncover what some refer to as the hidden curriculum -- the secret code to achieving success in college. The idea that the syllabus is a contract that binds not just the student, but the instructor; the possibility of attaining extensions on projects; the ability to read between the lines to decipher an instructor’s grading schema -- these are all parts of the hidden curriculum. But students shouldn’t have to have access to a secret code to be successful students. To that end, I often utilize grading contracts, which assign students grades based on their engagement, not natural skills in writing or literature or their ability to read my mind. Engagement grading encourages students to play with concepts and take risks without fear of getting a low grade. You can see an example of this in my First-Year Writing syllabus.
Transparency also means being honest with students about the workings of academia. To that end, I attempt to teach courses which demystify academic choices instructors make, such as my American Literature to 1880 course, in which I tasked students with interrogating the canon of nineteenth-century American Literature.
Flexibility
I emphasize the collaborative nature of my courses by giving the class the power to guide our time together and a say in the due dates of the assignments. Increasingly, in this student loan-laden and post-pandemic world, life gets in the way for students: their work schedules shift suddenly, they become responsible for the care of loved ones. Flexibility is necessary if we are to promote equity and inclusion. My students are not only encouraged to helm their educational experience in renegotiating their grading contracts, but also in leading our class time together.
Multimodality
In the twenty-first century, we no longer rely solely on alphanumeric text. By incorporating multimodal readings and projects into my courses, I encourage students to hone skills other than alpha-numeric writing ones. You can see what this looks like in the examples below. The first is part of a First-Year Writing project in which I ask students to shift their rhetorical situation and adapt a previous research paper into a short podcast. The second is a professional writing for arts management project in which I ask students to analyze, then re-design, a guide for a museum.
For additional information, please see my teaching philosophy.
You can see some sample syllabi here:
Literature as Laboratory: Science Fiction in the Long Nineteenth Century
You can find my C.V. here.