Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

image-right

My goal in the classroom is to create lively, productive conversations by inviting students to share and broaden their experiences through close encounters with complex texts. In my summer courses at Skidmore College, high-achieving high school students from under-served communities learned alongside current Skidmore students and adults from the Saratoga community. At UC Davis, I worked with international students, non-native English speakers, parents, students returning to college after other careers, those with disabilities, and those from different racial, economic, and cultural backgrounds. I have continued to teach students from all of these backgrounds, first at Ithaca College and now at Colby College, both of which are majority white and majority young-adult communities; I use collaborative learning practices that I have developed in response to my students and that encourage diverse perspectives in my classrooms.

Close analysis of a broad range of texts forms the core of each of my courses, and we support our close textual work with individual and group research projects. My students’ close readings become a foundation for their work as sophisticated readers and writers, whether they are comparing disparate texts, responding creatively to our readings, gathering evidence to support their claims, or placing their ideas in relation to those of classmates and experts. These skills are central to literary study, and also to students’ engagement as citizens within and beyond college.

Fall 2023 Courses

Community Literacy and Migration: Where are we and what are we doing here? How did we get here and how do we know what we know? What’s next and who needs to hear our stories? These three sets of questions will guide our exploration of personal essays, literary texts, scholarly criticism, images, and more as we seek to gain literacy—not only the ability to read and write but also to engage cultural knowledge—about Colby College and Waterville, about the communities from which we come, and about the concept of migration. We will examine our arrival in the Colby College community through reflective, analytical, narrative, and research-based writing, peer editing, and other literacy-focused activities. We will place our own stories in relation to those of writers from the past and the present, including Shakespeare, Joy Harjo, Margaret Cavendish, bell hooks, and Mohsin Hamid. Our goal will be to develop a successful college-level writing practice while gaining a textured understanding of what it takes to migrate, what kinds of knowledge we bring with us when we do, and how humans gain literacy and become creators of new knowledge when we join new communities.

Syllabus
Introduction to Environmental Humanities: The environmental humanities is a big tent: under it, we gather a grand variety of modes of knowledge making from humanities disciplines that give us valuable traction on environmental problems. The central aim of this course is to invite you into the tent and show you around a bit. No matter your discipline, storytelling is a crucial tool. In order to tell a good story—about data you’ve collected, about a human’s or species’ history, about a community’s religion, philosophy, food culture, and so on—you need to know your purpose and your audience and you need to shape your information carefully. Even when your goal is to break rules and create change, you need to know what your audience counts as a “good” story, what they see as reliable evidence, how they relate to someone from your background and training, and how they might react to the form and content of your story. Stories are powerful; like any tool, they can cause harm: European cultural narratives about people from Africa and the Americas helped justify genocide and maintain systems of plantation slavery and oppression; cultural narratives about sharks or about swamps have prevented scientists from receiving training or grant money to study vulnerable species and habitats; cultural narratives about vaccines and about climate change have led many people to refuse life-saving care and planet-saving policies; I could go on. Humans made these harmful narratives. We can also confront their consequences and change the story. To me, the best stories are the weird ones, the ones that resist simple answers, the ones that teach us to embrace and inhabit complexity, the ones that provide rest or protest or challenge or solidarity. So in this course we will study definitions and histories of “environments” and “humans” and “humanities,” and examine some of the central difficulties in the field. We will think capaciously about who we include, human and non, in the category of “personhood” and to whom we afford the dignity and rights due to persons. We will investigate the tools that several disciplines—literary studies, religious studies, history, philosophy, ecofeminism, indigenous studies—use to understand environments and persons. Equipped with our findings, we will read, watch, and listen to stories and we will create new stories with the goal of imagining otherwise for ourselves and for those other persons with whom we share space.

Syllabus

Colby College Courses

Language, Thought, and Writing: Community Literacy and Migration
Foundations of Literary Studies
Introduction to Environmental Humanities
Literature and Environment
Staging Pirates and Captives in Early Modern Romance
Shakespeare and Injustice
Women, Science, and Politics in 17th C Literature

Ithaca College Courses

Academic Writing I
Literature and Environment: Vital Rivers, Rivers in Crisis
Renaissance Literature: Women, Science, and Politics in 17th C Literature
Introduction to Poetry
Shakespeare (sophomore level)

Teaching History

2015-2021 Lecturer at Ithaca College
2009-2015 Associate Instructor at University of California, Davis
2008-2009 Teaching Assistant at University of California, Davis
2011-2012 Instructor at Skidmore College, Summer Program