Teaching
Courses Taught
Northern Illinois University
- ENGL203 - Writing and Composition II, Researched Writing (Spring 2023, Spring 2024)
- ENGL322 - Language in American Society (Spring 2023)
- ENGL103 - Rhetoric and Composition I (Fall 2022, Fall 2023)
Teaching Tools I’ve Made
A Third Attempt at a Teaching Philosophy
Vikki Reynolds (2019), writing about the ethics of working as a clinical counsellor, stresses that “our work is not innocent, and as counsellors we do not suffer the largest consequences for our incompetence or lack of experience: our clients do” [1]. The same is true for us as educators. We must learn how to walk the thin line of preparing our students for the world they are entering while avoiding perpetuating the status-quo of injustice against linguistic minorities. Dryer (2015) notes that writing is not “natural in the way that speech is” [2]. Students who can eloquently express themselves in front of their peers in a TikTok or a podcast or a YouTube video might suddenly find themselves unable to put their thoughts to words in a way that they think is acceptable to their professor. This is one of the many side effects of the historically enforced requirement for “Formal Academic English” from students. Under that standard, students raised with a different variety of English as their home dialect see unfair challenges compared to their peers. We as educators acknowledge that the essays we ask our students to write are not, themselves, the end goal. We seek to teach students how to form arguments, effectively research topics, and understand audiences in writing contexts. So why do we still follow the old models? We need to find a way to fundamentally transform the way we talk about and teach the act of writing. We need to be able to show them that what we are teaching is important and relevant to them beyond the essays and term papers; we need to teach for transfer across domains.
- Reynolds, V. (2019). Justice-Doing at the Intersections of Power: Community Work, Therapy and Supervision. Dulwich Center Publications.
- Dryer, D. B. (2015). Writing is not Natural. In L. Adler-Kassner, E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies (pp. 27-29). Utah State University Press.