My years in the classroom inform my effective project management and talent for asking the right questions and finding unexpected answers. I don't currently teach, but I also am always teaching something — myself, most often.
I value inquisitiveness and conversation as modes of learning. Unlearning, the process of seeing ideas anew, is just as important in my critical and creative courses. I strove for my students to be surprised and delighted by texts, and to approach writing and thinking from a new perspective. Most importantly, my students learned about their own lives from each text. Students expected daily in-class writing exercises to build their relationship to writing as a practice of distillation, reflection, and critical engagement with their thoughts.
Prompt
IELTS Prep 2-week Intensive. Designed and led a small group (4 students) 2-week boot camp. Students worked together and independently to develop their grammar, critical thinking, writing planning, and writing skills. Students improved their practice IETLS scores by an average of 2 levels.
High School Writing Intensive with Harlem Children's Zone (NYC). Adapted SRSD pedagogical theories to create a 4-week writing-intensive course designed as an intervention course for students most in need of dramatic writing growth.
Red Rocks Community College
Introduction to Composition, a course based on multi-modal writing goals to broaden students understanding of relevant writing.
Advanced Research Writing, a semester-long guided research course where students investigated a core research question from different perspectives and modes to reach a final comprehensive project and argument.
College Reading and Writing, a pre-composition course to prepare students with critical reading, writing, and analysis skills. Most students were adults returning to school after significant time off from education.
University of Michigan
Introduction to Writing and Academic Inquiry. A composition-focused class built around Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, a tool to investigate student beliefs and perspectives as critical thinkers.
Introduction to Creative Writing. Poetry-oriented, this course invited students to experiment with multiple genres to identify their creative interests and the questions driving their imagination.
Teaching Assistant to Eileen Pollack for Jewish American Comic Fiction and Cody Walker for American Comic Fiction
Chicago School of the Arts
Guest poetry lecturer and workshop leader. The workshop focused on writing as a physical act. Students were invited to write using different sizes and orientations of paper, meditating on how different physical forms invited different manifestations of their thoughts, and even different topics.
Ann Arbor District Library
Letterpress Instructor. Designed and led a monthly letterpress printing lab open to the public. Managed a team of five assistants. Introduced the public to letterpress design and printing basics, and oversaw independent student work. The letterpress labs were so popular that they regularly exceeded capacity.