a blurb on teaching

The diversity of spaces where I have found knowledge and shelter has resulted in a scavenger pedagogy inspired by queer-of-color communities. As individuals so often denied our own histories, we pilfer, combine, and reimagine knowledges from sources both durable and ephemeral. I first witnessed queer-of-color pride in the voice of a slam poet, beaconed through a microphone in a basement bar. On the wall of an LGBTQ+ center, I discovered Audre Lorde’s “A Litany for Survival,” written for those “who live at the shoreline… who love in doorways coming and going.” I try to walk that shoreline, between university classrooms and community spaces, culling knowledge from both the water and the sand (isn’t that how castles are made?). My understanding of education emerges the inherited and embodied understanding that knowledge scaffolds social hierarchies; that life-saving wisdom is discovered both in labs and in drag shows; and that radical transformations occur when we recognize the arbitrariness and limitations of our epistemological divisions. I strive to configure my classroom as a space for new encounters where students cultivate relationships with wide-ranging experiences and histories, with one another and with me, and with their visions of the futures they would like to pursue.

The courses that I design and teach tend to contextualize critical theory within our lived worlds, applying analytical principles to genres such as memoir, media campaigns, and television shows. In “Feminist Rhetorics,” for example, we applied Royster and Kirsch’s “feminist rhetorical practices” to case studies such as #MeToo, The Handmaid’s Tale, and the “It Gets Better” Project. To practice “critical imagination” and “strategic contemplation,” we borrowed an exercise from Southerners on New Ground (SONG)—a regional organization that foregrounds queer-of-color-liberation. As SONG does in its own pedagogical spaces, we assembled a “matrix of domination” that queries how race, gender, sexuality, and other identity markers are policed by analogous state and social mechanisms. We charted how “family separation” affects immigrants, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ people, and poor folks based on accusations of “unfit parenting.” We traced the different manifestations of “intimidation”—physical and emotional, explicit and implicit—that prevent racial, gender, sexual and other minorities from public participation. We discussed how these forces collide at the intersections of marginal identities, connecting feminist theory to its origins in embodied wisdom.

In my courses, I also attempt to scaffold and steward the writing process. I integrate reading and writing journals, guided reading responses, and project proposals in order to facilitate the development of students’ projects and ideas. This attention to the writing process is part of a larger commitment to make legible the oft-unspoken rules of participating in academic conversations, the occlusion of which often works to exclude minority, nontraditional, and first-generation students. With awareness of how knowledge circumscribes access to other cultural resources, I see my responsibility as both challenging the means and valuations of knowledge production as well as supplying students with the tools and understanding to enter and intervene in extant conversations.

In the 2019 Chair’s Address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Asao Inoue charged writing teachers with a responsibility to address White Language Supremacy, asking, “How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other?” His query revived the question that initiated my own language journey--as a queer, genderqueer, disabled child of first-generation immigrants: “How do we survive a world that regards difference as threat?” My answer, imperfect and ever-in-progress, is that we language into and through discomfort; we practice listening and responding to those whose histories and voices have been occluded; we tell our stories as interwoven threads of a much larger social fabric. The shoreline, after all, is less a border than the space where ocean touches land. It recedes and returns with the tide, which moves not only with the pull of sun and moon, but with the force of human development. In the vastness of global histories, my classroom is hardly a ripple in the sea. However, queers of color also taught me the transformative potential of utopian dreaming; to return to Audre Lorde: “It is better to speak / remembering / we were never meant to survive.”

shout outs

Like many in my field, I began teaching as a first-year graduate student with no experience and little idea of what I was doing. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from and grow alongside generous colleagues, students, and community partners— and to have found this discipline that takes seriously the study and art of teaching. Major influences in my pedagogical growth include:

Courses I’ve designed and taught

Graduate

  • Misfit Rhetorics

  • Composition Pedagogy

  • Storying Social Change: Narratives of (Un)Belonging

  • Feminist Rhetorics

  • Article Writing Workshop

Undergraduate

  • Medical Rhetorics, Race, and Gender

  • Storying Social Change

  • Podcasts & Paradigm Shifts: Storytelling for the Revolution

  • Transgender Rhetorics

  • Disability Rhetorics

  • Principles of Rhetoric

  • Feminist Rhetorics

  • Introduction to Creative Writing

  • Nonfiction Writing Workshop

  • Composition I & II