Teaching Philosophy

“King Arthur (from the Nine Heroes Tapestries,” Wool, c. 1400, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 32.130.31; 47.101.4. Open access.

In composition and literature classroom alike, I invite students to engage with the texts we read as cultural forces through their form and structure as well as their content. My teaching experience ranges from composition classes to literature classes covering such topics as medieval literature, Early Modern/Renaissance literature, the first half of the British literature survey, speculative fiction, YA fiction, and game studies. In my classes, no matter the time period, students engage in critical examinations of culture, writing, and literature, as questioning our practices, histories, and texts allows us to gain a greater understanding of them.

When reading Beowulf, for example, we began by considering whether Beowulf was a good king. Most of my students emphatically said yes, giving examples from our contemporary culture to argue for effective leadership (and focusing primarily on American ideas of heroism). I asked students to return to the text and previous lectures to find evidence of what an early English audience would have considered to be a good king. They cited evidence from both Beowulf and other Old English poetry that we had previously discussed, making connections across course texts. Although this was only a few weeks into the semester, students easily identified early English kings needing to be ring-giving (and heir-producing!) and how other kings in Beowulf were readily identified as god cyning. Following this data-gathering, we compared our evidence and saw that there was very little overlap between the their initial assessment of heroism and the poem’s. Using close reading and analysis allowed students to see the text—one that many were initially uninterested in—as distinct from their own interpretation of the world, but consistent with other texts from its period.

In my composition classes, students focus on topics they can relate to, such as digital rhetorics (where we explored discussions of technology both in and out of academia), quests and narratives (where students wrote their own hero’s journey), as well as a class on medical and scientific rhetorics in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. I make extensive use of peer editing and drafting in order to emphasize writing as a process and incorporate activities into my lesson plans that allow students to interact with and help each other. For example, when discussing writing strong openings in my narrative class, we looked at submissions for the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest, which seeks to find the worst-written opening line for a novel. As students analyzed the increasingly ridiculous submissions, they continually returned to a stumbling point: many of the submissions were funny. Thus the lesson, as intended, shifted into a discussion of genre, as I explained that what might not fit for a hardboiled detective novel might work brilliantly in a comedy. My classes also incorporate play; for example, students participate in a scavenger hunt in the library (to learn both the breadth of its space as well as its offerings) and contests to see who can narrow down a library catalogue search to the fewest results (to learn how to use the catalogue’s filtering system). I allow for hands-on practice in the composition classroom as well, using activities such as a jigsaw puzzle to teach the order of APA citations. Putting together citations physically enabled students to correctly cite material in their own work.

Just as I bring attention to the importance of research and writing in the literature classroom, I also ask students to consider the cultures surrounding each text, and encourage discussion of differences in culture, race, religion, gender, and sexual orientation throughout my classes. Teaching the Crusades, for example, saw students reading an Islamic text (The Book of Contemplation), or a Byzantine narrative such as Anna Komnene’s Alexiad alongside French and English narratives (such as alternate accounts of Pope Urban II’s call to crusade and the Song of Roland), allowing us to consider the ways Crusader imagery is used to further Islamophobia today. The discussions that accompanied these texts saw students grapple with their own biases upon reading these historical perspectives, as well as how these primary sources differed from the sanitized and valorized versions of the Crusades that they had experienced in both high school and popular culture. Similarly, my Science Fiction & Fantasy course—too often a genre reserved for white male authors—featured units on Africanfuturism using Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, postcolonialism and monster theory through Silvia Moreno Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, and queer theory via Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. Students questioned rigid constructions of genre and genre conventions through exploring these texts and actively engaged with theorists such as Jack Halberstam and Barbara Creed in course essays. Furthermore, multiple students reached out to me to share that they have continued to read widely and have chosen to seek out diverse perspectives after this course.

I craft my classes in such a way for students to develop their own interests alongside course texts and through assignments. In the gateway course for the English major, students completed a scaffolded series of assignments designed to practice close reading and analysis which culminated in the third and final unit of the class, where students led group discussion, now confidently performing literary analysis out loud and in front of the entire class rather than in private essays. Although each group of students was only required to lead class for 10 minutes, several groups came prepared enough to continue running the conversation for the entire class period. My students loved this scaffolded approach, citing the final discussion leading as “one of my favorite things we did in this class,” that they “[made] the students invested in the plot of the readings,” and that “These discussions were extremely helpful in understanding the class texts, and also a way to form well thought out opinions.” This further empowered students to direct class focus to the topics that were important to them, with several groups emphasizing conversations surrounding race, gender, and class, and other groups drawing specific attention to literary form and genre. Similarly, in my interdisciplinary medieval studies course, my students’ final project asked them to choose a medieval topic of interest, create a modern recreation of it, and write a research paper that both situated their project within its original context and within the modern world. This allowed students in diverse majors to bring their own skills into the course, such as the costuming student who recreated a gown from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry or the engineering student who used AutoCAD to recreate the Franks Casket. As students conducted research alongside their project, they were able to connect their own modern interests to a medieval past that may have previously felt foreign and unreachable.

Connecting such modern and medieval interests has allowed me to embrace theories of play in the literature classroom as well. For example, following a discussion of passages from the Decameron and a lecture on the plague, students were randomly assigned roles in a fictional town outside of Paris. Students then worked together to make decisions that would affect their characters’ lives and chances at survival, citing specific examples from both the lecture and class readings as they made their decisions and rolled dice to determine their fates. Many students were outraged to find that they still caught the plague despite taking reasonable precautions, reflecting the high death rate in the fourteenth century from the disease (I am excited to revamp this lesson in light of the pandemic!). The subsequent exam on the Black Death had high scores based on their familiarity and engagement with the material. These strategies resulted in classes that students said were “fair and rigorous” and that had a “good energy, variation of activities, clear structure, and interesting readings.” In fact, students cited this very role-playing game as their favorite course activity.

I believe that my methodology has had a net positive effect on my students, as I consistently receive on teaching evaluations scores of 4.7 or higher on a 5-point Likert-type scale and have won multiple department-level teaching awards. In a course evaluation, one student stated that “I am now confident in my writing” after taking my Accelerated First-Year Composition course. Another student stated that “I have learned more about real-world writing skills from it than I have in any other class. While some of my smaller writing skills [. . .] were learned outside of class, this class was the reason I pursued learning them. [. . .] I leave this class having far more developed writing skills and a much more positive outlook on English than I had when I began the semester.” A further student stated at the end of First-Year Composition, “I could not have asked for a better English professor.”