Teaching Philosophy

As an early-career faculty member in the modern humanities classroom, I strongly believe in a quality liberal arts education being a right to all enrolled college students.

I have experience teaching writing, literature, and translation studies to majors and non-majors. As a recent Ph.D., my philosophy in mentoring students is ballasted on open dialogue about the role of reading, textual analysis, and writing skills in students’ lives, from introductory to advanced works.

My goal is to model an interdisciplinary humanities approach that invites students from all backgrounds and disciplinary interests to become articulate and confident writers and readers who are simultaneously good at posing their thoughts and considering others’ opinions in earnest. My favorite instructors in college were always the ones who effortlessly challenged students to take their own thinking beyond their comfort zones while inviting individual student perspectives to co-curate the learning environment with the instructor and with their fellow students. I try to stick to this simple model as an instructor.

I encourage students to contribute connections from their own lives to my selection of literary, historical, and theoretical sources while guiding them through the research, analytical and writing skills necessary to pursue bold and rigorous knowlege production.

Moat of my courses blend important titles of literature with news articles, museum and archive visits, theory, and history. I strive to introduce students to  different literary, historical, theoretical, and political traditions as a way to model an interdisciplinary methodology in literary and cultural studies. Doing so equips students with the tools necessary to pursue traditional critical expertise in literary or cultural studies, but also to apply their humanistic training to disciplines not usually associated with the study of literary texts.

My assessment style, with small variations depending on the needs of the institution and program, uses an outcome-based grading that prioritizes dialoguing about how learning goals are met during the semester. In this assessment style, students are graded in a scale of exceling, accomplishing, and not accomplishing goals established per each assignment. The labor dedicated to participation, revision, and creativity of projects differentiates between a passing grade, a comfortable passing grade, and a high grade for the class. This conversational grading approach mirrors my classroom facilitation style.

I strive to hold my classes like mini academic and public scholarship conferences. As the more experienced researcher and instructor in the room, I situate my voice as a discussant in a panel, or as a moderator in a q&a session, while interspersing the discussion with short lectures and explanations. This allows me to model the academic temperament of stepping up and stepping back during discussions while giving students insight into my expertise and incentivizing their own development as independent and confident thinkers.

Both as a faculty member since earning my degree, and in my pedagogical experiences during my doctoral work, I have embraced the causes of mental health, accessibility, collegiality, freedom of thought, and equity in higher education. Through my different college and university affiliations, I have helped organize, conceptualize, and facilitate colloquia on creating more equitable classroom spaces through digital tools and activities that cater to different learning styles. I also have worked with my peers to increase the awareness and the discussion of resources to address faculty-student solidarity at a labor level and community well-being in the process of academic production and learning. In the teaching component of my academic posts, I have helped to maintain a healthy bridge between faculty and students, and faculty and administrators across rank. Grounding these relationships in pedagogical excellence, as I see, is essential in striving for a teaching and research balance in the modern university classroom.