At Syracuse University, I have served at Teaching Assistant for large lecture courses on popular culture, film, and game studies and have been the Instructor of Record for three different introductory courses: Reading the Environment, Reading Popular Culture, and Post-1865 American Literature. In my courses, I centralize a range of written, verbal, and creative assignments to help students think critically and engage rhetorical skills for a variety of contexts and audiences. I utilize a spread of media texts in my teaching, asking students to engage critically with novels, films, advertisements, music, games, virtual reality, social media posts, and more—helping them develop media literacy skills and cultivating within them the ability to make unexpected connections between traditional “art” and the media in which they are already immersed. The end goal of all of my teaching is to help students develop an analytical toolset to understand and engage critically with the world around them.
In my combined seven years of classroom experience—five years in-person, two years hybrid and online—I have worked with a broad population of students with diverse needs, including first generation university students, ESL (English as a second language) students, and students of all abilities with various supplemental needs. As a result, I have developed a teaching and mentorship style that is adaptable and targeted at meeting individual student needs to ensure that all students have a chance to succeed in the classroom and beyond.