Coming from a country where education has been reduced to perpetuating government-approved “facts” rather than cultivating an ability to raise questions, I see critical inquiry as a cornerstone of my teaching philosophy. In my classroom, I emphasize the concept of narrative not as an official history set in stone but as a construction shaped by competing social, cultural, and political forces and people’s lived experiences. My goal is to provide students with a diverse and inclusive environment in which they can grow as empathetic and responsible critical thinkers through experiential learning, group work, self-reflection, and revision as they examine how narratives—literary, cinematic, and cultural—shape our perception of the world and our place in it.

  

Informed by Patricia Hill Collins’s theory of intersectionality as critical inquiry praxis, I design courses that invite students to tease out the relationship between society’s power structures, identities, and hegemonic narratives. For example, by combining Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943), George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), and Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017) in one unit, my “This is America Hollywood” invites students to interrogate the shifting meaning and function of the zombie. By tracing the evolution of the “zombie” from its origins in West African and Haitian folklore through to the civil rights movement and the Obama era, students practice the basics of film analysis in the interest of understanding how historical and social forces shape common horror tropes as well as reify racial difference. To create a supportive classroom environment that allows students to tackle these difficult issues of privilege, inequity, and racism safely and responsibly, I use small-group discussions and structured reflections on their lived experiences. I introduce students to the practice of intersectionality and the value of self-reflection on the first day of classes when I supplement the typical “Where are you from?” question with a written reflection comparing how the place they come from shapes their identity with how it shapes other people’s perceptions of them. These practices typify my teaching philosophy, which emphasizes the diversity of opinions and identities to foster the kind of critical “meta” reflection that empowers students.

 

Seeing my classroom as a vehicle for students’ academic, professional, and personal growth, I create assignments that bridge experiential learning with community-based learning. In my composition courses, students examine how the social, cultural, and political forces shape media and representation as well as the ways that creators—and students—can use their personal voice and multimodal technologies to resist dominant power structures. In “The Power of Hashtags: Argumentation and Digital Activism,” for instance, I scaffold assignments toward a final group project that invites students to create a social media campaign on a local social issue of their choice. After spending the first half of the semester analyzing global social movements, such as #BlackLivesMatter, #OscarSoWhite, and #MeToo, students work with the Louie B. Nunn Center of Oral History and the Special Collections Research Center to examine oral histories and archival materials concerning the experiences of women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community in Appalachia. Designed to promote intellectual curiosity, creativity, and civic initiative, critical assignments like this not only nurture students’ ability to think logically and critically and to write and speak with clarity and grace but also extend their research beyond the boundaries of the classroom. My students’ multimedia projects—websites, documentaries, podcasts, and social media campaigns—have been recognized with “WRD Excellence in Composition Awards,” while their written work appeared in The Engaged Citizen, the department’s homegrown textbook.

 

My classroom policies reflect my experience of working with first-generation college students and low-income students, often struggling to balance work or caretaker responsibilities with their studies. While upholding high academic expectations, I build classroom structures that function as “safety nets” allowing students to take creative and analytical risks in their learning process. For instance, I encourage students to use my feedback to revise their projects, teaching them to see writing as a continual process of trial and error. I cultivate the practice of critical listening and cooperative learning among my students by using small-group discussions, mini-debates, peer reviews, and frequent in-class writing. To account for differences in learning styles and promote inclusive education for students with disabilities, I include descriptive ALT text for images embedded in Canvas, offer in-person and virtual office hours, provide examples of high- and low-quality work for major assignments, and solicit student feedback which includes regular anonymous check-ins. I introduce students to campus resources by organizing trips to Media Depot and inviting speakers from the Writing Center and the Counseling Center to assist them with developing effective support networks that will last them beyond my classroom. As a result of my dedication to accessibility and equity, students consistently identify assignment scaffolding, utilization of campus resources, and centering of their lived experiences as some of the most effective aspects of my courses in their evaluations. 

 

My dedication to fostering students’ success has led to my nomination for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning fellowship at the Center for the Enhancement of Learning and Teaching in 2022-2023. As a fellow, I focused on how completing the group contract in the first-year writing classroom affects students’ communication and how instructors can better support collaborative learning in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. To address these questions, I designed an IRB-approved study for two sections of my Composition & Communication II course and developed a series of individual and group reflection exercises that had students practice active listening, collaboration, and conflict resolution in a safe environment. The work I conducted as a fellow became the basis of my presentation for the university-wide 2023 GradTeach Live! competition, where I placed first by demonstrating how I use the scaffolding of individual and group reflection to foster students’ collaborative communication skills. My student-centered inclusive pedagogies have also been recognized with the 2024-2025 Provost Outstanding Teaching Award, the Association of Emeriti Faculty Endowed Fellowship, the 2023 Jean G. Pival Outstanding Teaching Assistant in the Department of English, and the 2023 Excellence in Teaching Award in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies (WRD). 

 

In sum, my purpose as an instructor is to promote equity and critical inquiry in the classroom by providing students with access to campus resources, synthesizing classroom and community work, and guiding them through reflection and collaborative learning. When students leave my classroom at the end of the semester, they have the skills to leverage their constructive behaviors into effective collaboration and the critical abilities necessary to meet the responsibilities of democratic citizenship in a global society.