Teaching
Narrative & Philosophy
My teaching practice began in the developmental writing classroom at Santa Ana College where I taught condensed night and weekend writing courses.
I would arrive for a three or four hour class armed with a mason-jar full of iced coffee (a holdover from my New England upbringing) and a protein bar. My students arrived with venti coffees–extra shots of espresso. In one of my classes, a group of students that sat near the front was composed of single mothers. They would call their children to say goodnight during our break. I loved teaching in this environment. Exhausted at times, we would all push forward on our personal, educational, and career goals like a relay team tapping one another to perform the next leg.
"Revise this, expand that," I would say, sending the paper out, "and then let me look at it again."
In many ways, this was a reparative experience. My own relationship to education had been composed of a combination of a praise-drive and an anxious desire to escape poverty. I wanted luxuries like a well-warmed house in winter, the kind with heating under the floorboards. Maybe even a walk-in shower or closet. I was not sure how to get there, but I thought that seeking out social status through education was a good start.
This resulted in me going to a wonderful undergraduate school that showed me what wealth could buy. The private liberal-arts education was ubiquitously considered the premier form of education in the northeast. Still, at times I felt alienated from my peers who had spent their summer before college kayaking, mountain climbing, and traveling, while I had worked the McDonald's Drive-Thru to pay for my freshman year textbooks. All in all, I had an excellent education paid for by scholarships and grants and lots of loans.
Teaching at SAC reminded me that education and debt need not go hand in hand. It inspired me to be a better instructor, a leaner one, capable of doing less with more. I taught out of the just-barely out-of-date copy of The Little Seagull Handbook so my students could get their textbook for cheap and carry it with them throughout the rest of the writing sequence.
During this time, I also participated in the 20-hour Online Teaching Certificate at SAC. This experience shaped much of my pre-pandemic online teaching practice. This training involved the creation of a 16-week asynchronous composition course and the experience of a rigorous peer-review process with emphasis on creating an inclusive and culturally informed online learning environment.
Then I left to pursue my PhD.
At UCR, I have gone on to teach online courses in synchronous and asynchronous modes for a total of six out of my total sixteen terms which have spanned a wide range of writing, literature, and media courses.
My approach to teaching composition and literature in the classroom emphasizes the difficulties that arise out of our desire to understand and express ourselves through writing. This foregrounds questions about what language is and does, and the role of literature in our understanding of the self and the world around us.
I teach texts like Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, which tracks a young boy’s journey to understand himself at the intersection of multiple cultures, each influenced by history, religion, and sense of place. Students learn to interpret Anaya’s lyrical prose, the cultural references to la llorona and brujería, and the text’s place within the Chicano/a literary movement of the 1970s.
Teaching this material encourages students to make connections between the act of close reading and understanding oneself, that “reading” culture is also a way of interpreting the layers of rhetoric categorizing the people, spaces, and places around us.
These skills are increasingly important in the post-pandemic era and in the rise of AI. Now more than ever, I believe educators must deliver a high-quality education that is tailored to the needs of the students and the course. In many cases, an English, Composition and Rhetoric educator must also work to repair students’ relationships with education and the classroom environment. In my developmental writing courses, for example, some of the assignments operate on a revise and resubmit basis.
This allows students to receive up to full credit for assignments that they revise after incorporating feedback from myself and two of their peers. Students have reported that this practice has had a reparative effect on their relationship to writing and the classroom. One student wrote, “I felt like I was able to submit more established, well-written work due to the comforting assurance of leniency, rather than rush an assignment that came out half-developed and strained.” I want my students to feel that my courses are spaces to work through challenging materials and ideas. We also complete whole-class or group writing activities in class, showing the collaborative potential of this work.
Lastly, introductory archival methods are a part of my personal anti-imperialist and equity- minded pedagogical practice. I introduce students to digital and public archives that they–and their families–can access. By introducing students to this material, students have an increased ability to use independent research in and outside the classroom. This is one of the ways that I ensure my classrooms are student-centered. Students regularly choose and participate in the direction of their course study.
Being a teacher is an incredibly rewarding job. It has also required a great deal of nimble thinking as society has changed rapidly over the last eight or so years that I have been working as an instructor. Despite these changes, several tenets hold true to me: that education should be accessible to all, that communication skills are paramount in this shifting landscape, and that students benefit from having educators who are rooted in culturally responsive practices.