Teaching

My teaching is grounded in the belief that writing is a form of inquiry. Before students can construct strong arguments, they must learn to notice: to attend carefully to language, evidence, context, and perspectives that complicate their own assumptions. In first-year writing and interdisciplinary humanities courses, I therefore ask students to approach writing not as the reproduction of predetermined answers, but as a process through which understanding emerges. Through discussion, close reading, research, peer review, and revision, students learn to see themselves as participants in intellectual conversations rather than simply recipients of information.

Because inquiry begins with careful attention, I encourage students to recognize that meaningful texts extend far beyond the printed page. Landscapes, memorials, museums, murals, and communities all tell stories that invite interpretation, raising questions that cannot always be answered through reading alone. By asking students to engage these places with the same attentiveness they bring to literature, they begin to understand that writing and research emerge not only from books but from careful observation of the world itself. I increasingly encourage students to think of writing as one form of composing among many — whether analyzing literature, interpreting a memorial, engaging with community partners, or composing multimodal projects.

Experiential learning has become one of the most significant ways I foster that curiosity. During faculty-led study-away courses in Berlin, students read Anna Funder's Stasiland, Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men, and Elie Wiesel's Night alongside visits to sites including the former Stasi Prison at Hohenschönhausen, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Jewish Museum Berlin, and the East Side Gallery. Together we examined how memorials shape collective memory, how literature is transformed when encountered alongside physical spaces, and how public art raises enduring questions about power, representation, and who has the authority to occupy, preserve, or transform shared public spaces.

My understanding of accessibility was fundamentally reshaped while working with a legally blind student whose interpretation of an animated film challenged our class to reconsider how knowledge is produced. That experience transformed the way I design writing assignments. Rather than viewing accessibility as a set of individual accommodations, I now ask how assignments themselves might invite multiple ways of creating and communicating knowledge. Students have created multimodal poetry incorporating tactile braille, designed research projects that pair oral analysis with tactile Spotify codes, and explored how arguments can be communicated across visual, tactile, and auditory modalities.

I want students to leave my courses not simply with stronger essays, but with greater confidence in their capacity to ask meaningful questions, evaluate evidence, revise their thinking, and communicate with others across differences. For me, successful writing instruction is rigorous, relational, and reflective: students are challenged to grow, supported through meaningful feedback and revision, and empowered to approach unfamiliar ideas with curiosity, intellectual humility, and confidence in their own capacity to contribute meaningfully to academic inquiry.