My teaching emphasizes process-based learning, active experimentation, contrapuntal reading, and social issues, helping me design any class as a collaborative space of public-minded inquiry. As a queer male, I prioritize a diversity of perspectives in the classroom. I assign projects that spring from identity politics and require students to analyze how depictions of identities impact literary techniques, textual production, and socio-cultural representations. Using the ideas of engaged pedagogy, I teach students to uncover the story behind the story. My goal in interrogating non-dominant discourse is to help students recognize the multifaceted nature of any issue and to connect their learning to life outside of the classroom.

I routinely employ technology-oriented lessons and assignments in my English classes. For a research assignment, I have students write multimodal annotated bibliographies. These bibliographies require students to annotate their sources through programs like Adobe while also writing statements about the credibility and value of their sources for their research projects. In a literature course, students have the option to create websites on Wix and Weebly for a final project that spotlights the importance of writers such as Frank O’Hara and Renee Gladman. Technology-focused assignments like these benefit all students, particularly those who do not have any prior experience with website development or the Adobe Creative Suite.

In creative writing workshops, I take student-centered discussions one step further. Here, the author drives the conversation about their creative work, asking craft-based questions tailored through one-on-one meetings with me before workshop. After unpacking a story’s intentions, we address the author’s concerns. Readers are then invited to ask questions that move beyond thinly veiled opinions. Treating students as artists capable of articulating the issues in their work empowers them as writers. Throughout the year, I assign self-evaluations that ask students to describe in written detail the strengths of their projects. In these evaluations, students also articulate areas for growth and suggest next steps for their learning. Through written feedback and one-on-one meetings, I respond to these evaluations with further questions, knowing that students leave my classes with the tools to better understand their story and to recognize the complexity behind everyone else’s.

My English classes concentrate on different ways of analyzing texts to enhance our understanding of topics that have larger, global implications. To introduce contrapuntal reading skills, I use Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Morrison’s arguments help students recognize the unsaid, as well as the largely invisible, unimagined figures operating in literature. In class discussions, students respond eagerly to Morrison, broadening the conversation to talk about figures in literature such as Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre and the colonial associations of her presence in the narrative.

Students leave my courses with a burgeoning sense of critical socio-cultural consciousness and are equipped with the tools needed to become civic-minded professionals. My ultimate goal in my English courses is to cultivate in students a habit of mind that finds value and purpose in diverse forms of reading and writing. I work toward this goal by making my classroom a laboratory in which students can take stock of all of the different ways in which they are readers and writers, while embracing experimentation and risk-taking in their reading, writing, and thinking.