Teaching Philosophy

My goal as a professor is to help students compose stories that are meaningful to themselves and their communities, whether those stories take the form of zines, positionality statements, technical documents, or other genres. Our words matter because they do things in the world. They are not simply ink on a page, sounds in the air, or pixels on a screen; they are the building blocks for stories that create and sustain relationships among people. I therefore design my courses around a cultural rhetorics approach to writing pedagogy—one that recognizes and values the lived experiences, linguistic practices, and cultural knowledge students bring into the classroom.

I believe that communities shape how we understand meaning-making, what Candice Epps-Robertson describes as the “epistemology of home.” In practice, this means encouraging students to bring the cultural, experiential, and linguistic tools they have developed throughout their lives into conversation with scholarly research and rhetorical theory. Students are experts in their own experiences, and I seek to create classroom environments where that expertise is valued. Rather than positioning myself as the sole authority in the classroom, I treat students as collaborators who contribute their own knowledge to our shared learning community.

Because writing is fundamentally social and relational, I emphasize rhetorical awareness throughout my courses. Students learn that effective writing is not simply a matter of following universal rules, but of making intentional choices based on audience, purpose, genre, and context. Through activities such as peer review, students practice seeing writing as an exchange between people. They learn to engage one another’s work thoughtfully, offer meaningful feedback, and consider how their rhetorical choices shape the experiences of their audiences.

My assignments ask students to connect their personal, cultural, and community knowledge with academic research while composing across multiple genres and modalities. For example, students in my Advanced Exposition courses have created instructional zines that teach peers about activities, traditions, and practices meaningful to their communities. These projects require students to combine scholarly sources with lived experience while developing multimodal strategies for reaching public audiences.

Ultimately, I want to center the histories and experiences my students bring into the classroom, and to help them learn to reach different audiences in the process. I want students to understand that their words matter because they do things in the world for themselves as well as others. And I want to empower students to experiment with the stories they tell and the words they use in a friendly, supportive environment.