Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy animates from my disciplinary training within writing and rhetoric studies and my experiences as a non-traditional student. I am an educator who teaches from pedagogical training in writing studies, Indigenous studies, and cultural rhetorics. But before I became an educator, I was a queer, Mexican American, foster care alumnus who grew up in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Texas and who dropped out of community college to be a florist and went back to school after watching The Devil Wears Prada. These experiences spark into the pedagogical kinesis of the following values.

• • I believe that culture is rhetorical and vice versa, and I tailor my curriculum so that students can hone their cultural, compositional, and rhetorical savvy set to the pace of their backgrounds and commitments to their homes, their communities, and the world writ large.

  • I believe that education happens best in community, and my pedagogy includes opportunities for community-building (e.g., group work and instructor-student meetings) throughout the semester, which also entails configuring student projects to circulate beyond the classroom via public-facing composition strategies.

  • I believe assignments and activities should be attuned to students’ professional and personal interests, literacies, and goals, which should be accounted for in fun, practical projects and activities for students to draw upon and hone their knowledge while professionalizing.

These values shimmer in the daily moments of my course, and I mobilize them to craft an adaptive pedagogy grounded in social justice while attendant to my political and administrative realities as well as the learning objectives for my courses, which provide students with transferable multimodal and rhetorical skills useful across different academic, professional, and personal contexts, and I pay close attention to instilling digital methods for researching social networks and adapting rhetorical skills to account for digital cultures and rapidly transforming media ecologies. My courses also integrate the applied theory model that drives my scholarship, and I incorporate rhetorically informed user-centered design approaches to train my students as iterative and public-oriented thinkers and makers by implementing a multi-stage project approach with ample room for revision and reflection for my students to hone their compositional acumen. My project-based courses train students as solutions-oriented designers and problem solvers, and many of my projects are built with a community-engaged component such that my students spend time learning critical concepts and composing with an eye on accessibly translating knowledge for a public audience beyond the classroom. Moreover, I integrate professionalization moments to let students practice translating their work for various audiences, whether applying for a job or internship.

At the practical level, my pedagogy follows a scaffolded model of interrelated activities and smaller assignments that allows students to practice composing their larger projects for various rhetorical situations and audiences. These activities are often done in groups to foster collaboration so that students can work through concepts of audience, genre, and design in fun yet applicable ways—all with an eye on publics beyond the classrooms. In my class focused on archiving the city of Charlotte, my students created storymaps using geographic information system software that recounted often under-told or hidden stories of neighborhoods around the city through a collaboration with multiple citizens across the city and our community-engaged archivist; students focused on the intense gentrification racking the city, which likewise erases Charlotte’s vibrant Black history, as well as the effect of development on local fauna and flora. Students also conducted oral history interviews with everyday residents for the library’s archives, as well as short-form documentaries covering historical and cultural events across the city. Students presented their findings in an exhibit-style presentation at the semester’s end, inviting friends, family, and members of the public to engage with their stories of the city, which helped train them as public-facing composers while allowing them to understand the significance of presenting someone else’s story while rendering complex histories of development.

Beyond projects, I assign readings and examples from Black, Indigenous, and writer/rhetors of color (many of whom are also queer or disabled), In this centering, students with such identities—and those who do not share identive similarities—can see writing and rhetorical action done beyond racist, cisheteropatriarchal standards. As a former non-traditional student, I know firsthand how such moves can be vital to the success of marginalized students, and I also attend to student success along my own experiences in higher education, drawing from my positionalities to meet students where they are in their lives. I work with students to help them outline what academic practices work best for them, which often takes the form of: 1) a labor-based grading contract informed by anti-racist pedagogy, which emphasizes development, process, and not grades; 2) class-created assessment rubrics so students get the developmental assistance they specifically request with my guidance as the expert in the class; and 3) ongoing reflection through writing and group discussions so that students further develop their own learning according to my course goals. My nearly ten years of writing center consultancy work with primarily Mexican American, ESL, and international undergraduate and graduate students and faculty from across the country also inform the developmental feedback I give to students on their projects, activities, and other writings. Through these moves, I center generosity in my teaching, and I offer students flexible and negotiated deadlines, workloads, project details, and revision options depending on their needs, which helps students to practice advocating for themselves and, perhaps more importantly, their peers. With these pedagogical moves, I work to model for students the equitable workplaces and settings that we all might create together; they are the next generation, after all, and too often, the system works against the marginalized.

Finally, I also spend ample time revealing to students the hidden curriculum of higher education and the job market so they understand how to speak about their experiences working in groups, testing materials with public audiences, and ensuring accessibility. To be frank, I attend to this hidden curriculum because of my background growing up in foster care and as a community college dropout. I am in my position today thanks to numerous mentors and leaders who paved a path for me to become a leader in my classes and in my field. As such, I have mentored multiple queer and/or students of color in applying to graduate, law, and medical school, writing letters of recommendation and helping them plan careers. I know I am on the right path as an educator when every queer student and student of color has maintained regular communication with me for support, and I plan to continue this work throughout my career in higher education.