As a teacher and first-generation college student, I am committed to educational equity for all students, but especially those who have historically been excluded from higher education. My teaching practice centers students’ existing, culturally diverse literacy practices and leverages my considerable training, experience, and research knowledge of critical pedagogies and cultural competency to guide students in becoming more critical readers, writers, and thinkers. Over twelve years, I have designed and taught a range of in-person, hybrid, and online courses, including developmental writing, corequisites, and first-year writing; advanced composition courses like research writing, technical and professional writing, and digital rhetorics; and graduate composition theory and pedagogy. I also model my own inclusive, anti-racist, and culturally responsive teaching practices as a teacher supervisor for new graduate teaching assistants and a WPA responsible for designing continuing professional development for departmental and interdisciplinary faculty. Three primary principles guide my pedagogy: adaptive writers understand that discourse is shaped by communities; learning to write is a social, collaborative process; and equitable praxis is accessible, culturally responsive, and centers linguistic justice.    

Adaptive writers understand that discourse is shaped by communities

One of my core goals is to help students uncover the “hidden curriculum” (Anyon, 1980) of college writing. We explore how conventions for discourse are socially determined and shaped by disciplinary epistemologies (Bazerman, 2013) and develop strategies that draw from students’ existing funds of literacy to respond flexibly to different rhetorical situations. Inspired by Melzer (2014), students in my developmental writing courses examine writing prompts from across the curriculum to uncover how features like citation and appropriate ways of incorporating evidence reflect epistemological differences between disciplines. In first-year writing, students learn about John Swales’ (1990) concept of discourse communities—that is, groups of people who share genres of communication through which they work toward achievement of shared goals. Building on an assignment from Downs & Wardle’s (2020) Writing about Writing curriculum, students engage in an extended research project on a discourse community of their choice by collecting primary and secondary data and analyzing the community’s genres, languages, and discursive practices to better understand how their chosen community uses discourse to achieve goals and interrogate existing or potential problems in the community’s communication processes. I build on this project in my advanced composition course focused on digital literacies and composing in digital spaces by having students experiment with communicating the practical applications of their research findings using the digital genres and modes of the communities they studied—students create short form videos and image posts for TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube; recorded podcast episodes; led discussion threads on Discord; written wiki pages focused on relevant topics; and more.     

Analyzing artifacts like assignment prompts, multimodal genres, and disciplinary jargon prompts students to consider how these discursive structures reproduce particular expectations for writing and the entrenched notions of knowledge production, construction, and circulation guiding a community’s interactions with each other and our broader society. Students can then begin to understand the types of questions they must consider each time they enter a new discourse community, be it in school, the workplace, or in their personal lives. I encourage students to be more than just passive observers by taking a critical perspective on how acceptable genres and conventions within discourse communities may replicate systems of oppression by excluding or even punishing ways of knowing and languaging employed within historically marginalized communities. Students also experiment with a spectrum of multimodal genres, expanding their understanding of what constitutes a “text” and how they might employ the analytical tools they already have as digital and social media users in new ways. By helping students understand the ways that discourse is shaped by communities, I help students better navigate the vast differences in expectations for writing and research they might encounter in school, work, or life.   

Learning to write is a social, collaborative process

My perspective that learning to write is a social, collaborative process is grounded in my work as both a tutor and administrator in writing centers, my background in learning sciences, and my own experiences as a learner. Peer response is a core feature of my pedagogy. Early in the term, I have students draw from their own experiences with feedback to co-create community guidelines for peer response and negotiate standards for effective review collectively. Students first independently contribute to a public list in Google Docs of examples of feedback approaches and types of comments they find helpful or less helpful; we then use this list to generate discussion about effective feedback practices and develop a set of guidelines that all members of the classroom community (including myself) agree to follow. Through this process, students’ assumptions about what feedback others find helpful are challenged, such as the often-entrenched assumption that individuals from non-dominant language backgrounds primarily want or need feedback on grammar. Our community guidelines also form the basis for how students rate each other’s feedback in the online peer response application Eli Review and help guide my own response practices, reinforcing that students’ voices matter to every member of our classroom community.

Collaborative activities are also tied closely with self-reflection and analysis in my courses. For example, in my Writing Process Analysis essay, students choose an assignment they completed earlier in the term and gather data related to their writing and revision processes in the form of feedback from peers and myself, as well as their own reflective memos, self-assessments, and analyses of their work. These data are then used as evidence to support claims about how their writing and revision processes reflect their growth as college writers and thinkers. In this way, students not only learn more about themselves through social interaction and collaboration with peers, but they also expand their skills in analytical thinking by identifying trends in qualitative data and using those data as evidence for their own claims.

Equitable praxis is accessible, culturally responsive, and centers linguistic justice

My teaching is grounded in accessible, anti-racist, and culturally responsive pedagogies. I leverage an asset-focused mindset toward linguistic differences and students’ diverse experiences with learning to make my classroom a safe environment for students to explore how their existing funds of literacy can aid them in navigating rhetorical situations. My own research on programmatic assessment ecologies has corroborated that supposedly “colorblind” (Davila, 2017) standards-based assessment systems prioritize dominant white language and literacy practices (Inoue, 2015), which not only inherently advantages students from those backgrounds but also does violence upon students who are not (Inoue, 2020). I endeavor to affirm students’ right to their own languages by centering diverse voices in my readings so that students can see themselves in the writers and thinkers we study, encouraging students to draft in the language they feel most comfortable writing in, and designing activities that ask students to reflect on their own literacy histories and cultural language practices. I use alternative grading to make my classroom and accessible space where all students feel capable, comfortable, and confident participating. Drawing from scholarship on disability justice and “critical embodiment pedagogies” (Cedillo, 2018), I employ a variety of strategies in an effort to “reject structures that place the burden of resilience” (madoka currie and Hubrig, 2022, p. 134) on students and ensure my classroom is accessible to all students, particularly disabled students, students experiencing mental or physical health challenges, and students balancing work or family commitments with school. As a classroom community, we collaboratively negotiate “best by” time frames in place of hard deadlines by collectively considering how to balance some students’ need for flexibility with others’ for structure. I also make regular class attendance encouraged but not required, provide multiple ways for students to participate, and design course materials to be accessible through a variety of mobile devices and assistive technologies.

I also model these practices and mindsets in the curricular design, course policies, and instruction of my graduate pedagogy course and emphasize through my training and mentorship of GTAs and faculty the urgent need to center anti-racism and linguistic justice in our teaching. I devote considerable time and space to the specific needs and experiences of students from marginalized communities and we discuss a range of intersectional and inclusive practices including anti-racist assessment, anti-ableist pedagogies, and ways to support students from nondominant language backgrounds. The class culminates in two final projects (a teaching statement and a portfolio for a writing assignment unit) that ask GTAs to detail how their teaching practices and curricular materials explicitly account for the needs of diverse students.

As the three pillars of my pedagogy demonstrate, I believe an inclusive learning community begins with valuing and elevating the knowledges, experiences, and practices that students bring to the classroom. In this way, my primary goal as a teacher is to guide students in learning how to harness their existing funds of literacy to successfully navigate the writing situations they will encounter in my classes and beyond.