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All of my teaching endeavors—with undergraduates, graduate students,
and youth, in traditional classrooms and digitally-mediated
environments—are connected by two core pedagogical beliefs. First, I
believe that mentoring and reciprocity are vital to sustaining a
vibrant, diverse, more democratic learning environment. Second, I
believe that educators have a responsibility to prepare students for
meaningful participation in an increasingly multimodal society. These
beliefs underscore an approach to teaching that is deeply connected not
only to my research interests in the connections between literacy,
democracy, and new media, but also to my experiences as a
non-traditional student. To me, a mentoring approach to teaching first involves giving students permission to think of themselves as experts. Mentoring also means helping students to live in the intersection between theory and practice by reconciling difficult concepts with what students already know about their own lives and identities. This intersection is an important part of many teaching contexts, whether brainstorming classroom strategies with graduate teaching assistants, or figuring out what it means to construct a digital identity. Throughout my teaching, I try to foster a strong spirit of collaboration through the frequent use of group workshops and peer feedback sessions, as well as in my individual conferences with students, and I welcome opportunities to involve students in the assessment of their progress and the course as a whole. In short, the focus on mentoring and reciprocity in my teaching means that I don't do things to my students; instead, we do things together as we learn from one another. Closely related to this principle is my belief that literacy—the meaning-making practices of a literate society—carries profound connections to citizenship and community participation. Participation in a community usually requires the ability to effectively perform that community’s language. Yet while the traditional classroom has long privileged alphabetic texts, new media culture demands that students extend their analysis to not only print and text-driven documents, but also new media and image-driven texts. In response, my courses are designed to help students develop multiple literacies by asking students to work not only with print-based texts, but also with new media such as blogs, videos, and web-authoring tools, and to consider the impact that writing and reading in these modes may have for the student’s own meaning-making practices. Please view my full teaching philosophy and visit my online teaching portfolio. |  |