Courses
WRRH 100: Writer’s Seminar
WRRH 331: Advanced Style Seminar
WRRH 201: Grammar & Style
WRRH 360: Power & Persuasion
WRRH 420: Senior Seminar
WRRH 450: Australia and Bali Through the Media’s Lens (IDS)
FSEM 136: Sex & Text in the US
LGBT 101: Intro to LGBT Studies
LGBT 420: Fundamental Sexual Controversies
Philosophy
I approach teaching as an intellectual activity, as theory and as practice. In essence my guiding philosophy is that teaching is scholarship, lived scholarship, embodied scholarship, engaged and engaging scholarship. Teaching is research and reflection and civic engagement. My strengths as an instructor grow out of strengths I have cultivated as a writer and as a researcher. I am highly organized, efficient, critical, and balanced. I develop a student-centered pedagogy by making learning central and shared among all members of the class. That is, my classes assume that learning is an outgrowth of the dynamic interactions among teacher-students-content. I conceive of these interactions as fundamentally rhetorical, driven by purpose and audience.
I develop relationships that make learning central through active classes that blend a variety of strategies, combining lecture, discussions, and workshops. In each class, I try to rotate activities to carry a concept through various approaches and targeted to various learning styles. For example, a mini-lecture will introduce a concept, followed by small group work that asks students to discuss or apply a concept, followed by whole class discussion on the ideas and applications. This process allows students to be part of knowledge production, encourages them to see ideas as robust, and offers students with different learning strengths opportunities to engage with material in different ways; therefore my approach strives to keep students actively and socially engaged. I see and pursue learning as a collaborative endeavor that (for me) is best achieved in a dynamic and interactive classroom.
HWS news article: Comics Books Create Scholarly Inquiry