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 rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, technical and professional communication, and digital/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 against the backdrop 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.

• I believe teaching writing and rhetoric—lessons, assignments, examples—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.

These values shimmer in the daily moments of my course, and I mobilize them to craft a compassionate, anti-racist pedagogy grounded in gestures of social justice while attendant to my political and administrative realities. Overall, my courses provide students with transferable digital composition 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, rapidly transforming media ecologies, and especially the many ways digital media are used to control and trick people. 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. Many of my activity- and project-based courses 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 moments of professionalization to help students practice translating their work in my classes for various audiences, whether for applying to a job or integrating their coursework into their ongoing projects and worklives. As such, at the practical level, my pedagogy follows a weekly, scaffolded model of interrelated activities that allows students to practice composing for various rhetorical situations and audiences. These activities, often done in groups to foster collaboration, operate with students engaging in popular culture and media important to them (i.e., music, television, movies, social media platforms) so they can work through concepts of audience, genre, and rhetoric in fun and applicable ways—all with an eye on publics beyond the classrooms. 

In my Information Literacy and Digital Composing class, for instance, I partnered with the Critical Media Literacy Collaborative, a collective of faculty, staff, and students housed with my university's library, to have my students create a semester-long social media campaign. Projects covered topics such as information literacy basics, methods for talking with family members about conspiracy theories, how to not get catfished online (which is when someone creates a fake profile to scam someone for money or nude photos), and how to discern when written and visual media were generated or manipulated with generative AI. Their projects were published on the library's Instagram account over the Spring 2024 semester, garnering thousands of views, likes, and shares—all of which students are able to use as they make their way forward as professionals trained in writing and rhetoric. In another 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; 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 learn about, hear, and watch 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.

Beyond projects, I assign readings and examples of rhetoric out in the world to spotlight perspectives 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 praxis 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. I attend to student success along my own experiences in higher education, and I draw 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 and not grades; 2) class-created assessment rubrics so students get the developmental assistance they specifically request; and 3) ongoing reflection through writing and group discussions so that students further develop their own learning and goals. My nearly ten years of writing center consultancy work with primarily Mexican American, ESL, and international undergraduate and graduate students and faculty 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. For example, through a compassionate pedagogical practice, I have worked with students to reconfigure assignments to meet their discrete needs, which has taken the form of learning narratives being written for scholarship applications to offset unmet financial need, remix projects being reconfigured to be the launch of a social justice-focused podcast, and a disciplinary literacies project involving a résumé for an internship—a “once-in-a-lifetime chance” as I was told. 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 way things are is stacked against marginalized students. 

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 both paved a way for me in the academy and also guided me toward and through that path to becoming faculty. In the courses that I have taught, I have mentored and assisted multiple queer and/or students of color to apply to graduate and professional schools, writing several letters of recommendation and helping these students plan their careers despite the marginalizing forces keeping them down. 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.