2025-2026.

My teaching begins with a straightforward belief: writing is a skill that extends far beyond the classroom and students already use to navigate, understand, and shape the world around them. In my First-Year Composition courses, I approach writing as a technical and expressive practice under the belief that writing is a tool that allow students to analyze how meaning is made in their daily lives and highlight how they participate in that meaning-making themselves. My goal is to help students develop sharpened media literacy skills that give them the critical awareness to understand how writing, images, and digital texts function in the contexts they already inhabit: social media, media consumption, community participation, professional communication, and personal expression.

Making Writing Relatable Through Multimodal Literacy

I design my courses around the principle that students learn best when they can see themselves in the material and when concepts connect to their lived experiences. Rather than assigning dense theoretical texts, I favor a blend that takes the traditional texts that benefit a composition classroom and integrate a multimodal approach that treats writing as but one literacy among many. We examine how arguments are constructed across platforms—from traditional essays to videos, podcasts, memes, and visual culture. I share examples from media I care about and encourage students to bring their own examples into our classroom conversations. This approach isn’t just about accessibility; it’s about recognizing that students already possess sophisticated literacies in the media they consume daily. My job is to help them articulate what they already know and to sharpen those analytical skills for transfer beyond our classroom.

When I teach visual rhetoric, for instance, I don’t start with academic terminology. Instead, I ask students to bring in an image that matters to them, whether it’s album art, a screenshot from a game, a family photo, or a viral tweet. It is from that point we work together to unpack how these artifacts creates meaning. Through this process, students develop a communal vocabulary for discussing composition, audience, context, and purpose without feeling disconnected from the material. They begin to see that the same analytical tools we use to discuss their examples apply to academic writing, professional documents, and community-engaged communication.

Emphasizing Process and Community

I structure my courses to emphasize process over product. Writing is not a solitary act of genius but a collaborative, iterative practice that improves through feedback, revision, and reflection. Students in my classes workshop drafts with their peers, receive feedback from me throughout the writing process, and revise substantially before final submission. I build in reflection assignments that ask students to articulate their choices: Why did you organize your argument this way? Who is your intended audience and how did that shape your approach? What would you do differently next time?

This emphasis on process serves a larger purpose: it demonstrates that writing and creation are acts that benefit communities. When students understand that their writing can clarify an issue for classmates, explain a technical process to someone unfamiliar with it, or advocate for change in their communities, writing becomes more than an academic exercise; it becomes a form of participation. In my courses, students complete community-situated writing projects with the intent that they produce work that may circulate beyond our classroom: whether that’s creating content for campus organizations, developing public-facing informational materials, or contributing to community archives and digital projects.

Preparing Students for Transfer

Everything I do in First-Year Composition is oriented toward transfer: the ability to adapt writing skills to new contexts and audiences. I make this transfer explicit through assignments that ask students to analyze writing conventions in their majors, interview professionals about writing in their fields, and adapt their own work for different audiences and platforms. When students complete my courses, they leave with more than the ability to write a five-paragraph essay. They have practiced rhetorical awareness: understanding how purpose, audience, and context shape communication choices. They can analyze how texts work and use that analysis to make deliberate choices in their own writing. And they understand that writing is a flexible, powerful tool they will continue to develop throughout their academic and professional lives.

Teaching Beyond Composition

While my primary teaching experience is in First-Year Composition, I bring this same philosophy to other courses I am prepared to teach: literature courses with comparative focus, digital humanities methods, film and media studies, and visual culture. In all of these contexts, I emphasize student engagement with material, multiple entry points for learning, and the connection between what we study and the broader questions of how meaning circulates in the world. My research background in visual culture, digital methods, and comparative cultural production informs how I design courses that ask students to think across media, across contexts, and across their own experiences.

Ultimately, my teaching is guided by the belief that students deserve to understand the systems and technologies that shape their daily communication and to recognize and develop their extant skills to participate in those systems critically and creatively. I work to create classrooms where students feel empowered to experiment, to make mistakes as part of the learning process, and to see their own experiences as valuable sites of knowledge. When students leave my courses, I want them to carry forward not just specific writing techniques but a way of thinking: an awareness of how texts are constructed, their plurality, how those texts are accessed, and how students can use their own writing to contribute to the communities they care about.