During my years of teaching and academic service, I have come to realize that there is no single mode of teaching that is most successful for all students. As a result, I ensure that my approach to designing course content, in-class activities, and assignments is adaptable to diverse student needs, employing methods that support a variety of learning styles while scaffolding activities and assignments to help students develop critical skills through iterative practice and revision. I believe that my responsibility as an instructor is to create a multimodal and student-driven learning environment in which students can further develop critical thinking, textual interpretation, and both verbal and written argumentation skills that will help them become informed citizens in an increasingly complex, shifting, and globalized world.
In my years of in-person and online teaching, I have made it a priority to focus on student needs and providing the means for students of all abilities to succeed in the classroom. Having worked with diverse student populations including first-generation students, ESL students, students with developmental disabilities, and students with various learning accommodations, I understand the importance of meeting students where they are and understanding that all students come from different educational, physical, and sociocultural backgrounds. As such, I make an effort to adapt my teaching to individual student needs, encourage access to university accommodations and resources, and include underrepresented voices and topics in my classroom to insure that students feel included and equipped to succeed.
As part of this student-focused effort, I center my classroom around student-driven activities where they can discover meaningful insights through their own observations and the comments of their peers. In my early teaching, I received feedback that I relied too heavily on lecture and open discussion without variety, which made it easier for students to lose focus and feel detached from the material. I have since experimented with a few approaches to help students feel more involved in the class. During my second section of “American Literature Since 1865,” for example, I began each class with a student presentation about the day’s reading, asking the student in charge to take a specific detail from the text and, building upon their daily writing reflection, provide an interpretive argument about the stakes of their observations. In taking this approach, I realized that students who were often more quiet in class discussion had a chance to share their ideas, and students more generally would feel encouraged to engage with one another’s observations and ideas. I have continued to use this approach because it also allows me to guide discussions based on what students find most interesting or confusing, helping them to recognize how they and their peers are making observations that are in direct conversation with critical concepts in deep and meaningful ways. One student notes that “the class format where students lead the discussion has been beneficial to all of us, as I think it brings up parts of the reading that we think are important rather than us being told what we should focus on.” I pair these student-driven discussions with in-class activities including object-centered learning, thesis writing workshops, peer-reviews, and out-of-classroom experiences like visiting the campus VR lab, to engage students in new and diverse ways. While I still provide contextual lectures and come prepared with specific examples and case studies, I strive to be adaptable because I have learned that the best discussions originate from students’ interested observations and questions.
As an instructor, it’s important that I facilitate learning opportunities across media forms and disciplinary boundaries. As students become ever familiar with interconnected media cultures and interdisciplinary discourse in the age of mass media and the internet, I utilize my classroom to help students develop critical media literacy skills that enable them to navigate the increasingly complex world of texts that surround them. When designing the syllabus for “Reading the Environment,” for example, I employed photography, paintings, political speeches, documentary film, VR, literature, video games, and advertisements to encourage students to engage with various textual approaches, often in conversation with one another. To challenge and expand their understanding of what it means to “read” the natural world, I facilitated interdisciplinary discussions that they may not otherwise encounter in an English classroom to help them recognize how course concepts are valuable not only in the classroom, but in engaging with the world around them. I believe that this type of experience is crucial, because as students foster interdisciplinary thinking—drawing connections between seemingly unrelated media forms and texts—they engage in critical modes that are more nuanced and adaptable to real-world circumstances. Students have regularly expressed positive responses to this approach over the course of my teaching, stating that engaging with different media forms helped them both apply concepts in new contexts and stay engaged in class discussions.
I generally feel best about my teaching when I see students developing the ability to apply course concepts and think critically without my direct prompting. I feel that students’ confidence to make these kinds of connections has been, in part, influenced by my use of scaffolded assignments. In an age when it becomes ever tempting for students to rely on internet summary and generative AI to aid in written work, I use scaffolded assignments to enable students to successfully demonstrate their understanding across both low- and high-stakes assignments and develop their ideas over time, implementing feedback and working toward the strongest version of their work. Over the course of the semester, I provide framing assignments that scaffold the writing process into various stages so that they can practice each part individually. For example, I always frame essay prompts in reference to students’ weekly discussion posts, asking them to reflect on, and expand upon, their previous work. I also ask students to submit annotations of their chosen text of analysis, as well as an outline framing their argument and methodology to help them think carefully about structure before they begin writing. Finally, I provide time in class for peer reviews, allowing students to receive additional feedback and iterate on their work before submitting their final assignment. I make my assessment and feedback processes transparent, and I frequently communicate to my students the pedagogical purpose of various activities, assignments, and texts to help them understand how these small activities build toward larger learning outcomes. I have seen that doing so helps students understand not just what we are doing and what is expected of them, but also why I have chosen the activities that I do. In each course that I’ve taught, I have had students react positively to this approach in their feedback, stating that it helped them feel more prepared for higher stakes writing assignments by making each step feel distinct, approachable, and meaningful: “The breaking up of the writing process over several weeks has really helped me to better my writing as a process. Normally I would just write essays in one sitting but this has really helped me.”
In addition to traditional assignments, I design final projects that take an alternative approach to “writing intensive” material so that students can experiment with various genres of writing and communication. In “Reading Popular Culture,” for example, I asked students to compile a portfolio from their writing for the semester, pulling together blackboard posts, reflection journals, and essays and reflecting on how they saw their writing and understanding of course concepts develop over time. Alternatively, in “Reading the Environment” I asked students to periodically do place-based observation journals, taking fifteen minutes to observe the same environment multiple times and think about their experience of the world compared to the concepts and representations that we covered in class. At the end of the semester, I asked students to then produce a creative representation of that environment in conjunction with their observations, reflecting on how their creative work was influenced by the course. This approach allowed students to apply critical reflection not only in relation to material and concepts, but also in relation to their own work and their relationship to the world. It is my hope that in so doing, I encourage students to find ways for these ideas to resonate beyond the classroom.
Ultimately, I strive to be intentional and reflective about my teaching, utilizing a variety of approaches that help as many students as possible learn from a multiplicity of angles. I achieve this by soliciting feedback, hearing what my students really need, and iterating my approach. One student’s feedback notes: “The way you took our mid semester feedback into consideration and immediately made changes was really cool to see.” I feel best when I see students making connections to outside materials, thinking between disciplinary boundaries, and making critical observations about the world around them—and I feel that this happens best when students feel supported. Everything I do in my teaching is oriented toward making that happen, and I will continue to learn and adapt so that I can facilitate successful learning experiences, even as learning cultures shift and change.