My primary goal as an instructor is to create ample opportunities for a diversity of students to recognize, name, and cultivate the intellectual ambitions, expressive styles, and analytical skills they have already begun developing throughout their lives, whether through hobbies, academic and professional communities, or social media and daily interpersonal communication.

To this end, my pedagogical approach hinges on collaboration, accessibility, multimodal analysis, and the enthusiastic incorporation and encouragement of students’ own personal and academic interests. I find that being transparent about the value of—and my own enthusiastic interest in—our shared course content frees students to deeply engage with and ultimately pursue their own learning within and beyond the classroom.

I ground my pedagogy in the Universal Design for Learning framework, which recommends offering students various avenues of engagement, representation, and expression. I teach in a variety of modalities, including collaborative group projects, class discussion, structured activities, in-class drafting time, mock conference panels, one-on-one meetings, quizzes, lectures, and more. I derive joy from representing a diversity of authors in all my syllabi, allowing students with a wide variety of backgrounds to forge their own connections with the class materials. Making my classroom an anti-racist and accessible place will always be an ongoing project, for me, in which I continually learn and adjust my practices to better connect with and celebrate students’ perspectives.

Overall, my approach equips students with the tools necessary to foster their own connections to our course material, and to share those connections with both classroom our learning community and their wider worlds.