Writing & Scholarship

What follows here are writing samples produced during my English M.A. program at Arizona State University; these essays demonstrate my growth and skills as both a writer and scholar:

This first essay is a personal narrative of my journey as a writer. This was written early in my program and took a fair amount of personal vulnerability to produce it. It outlines my earliest experiences with writing in childhood through to my graduate work in education. I read it now and think that it's not quite perfect, but it is true and honest, which is actually fairly high-praise for any writing.  

In spite of my use of the movie Napoleon Dynamite, the following essay is a good example of my most rarified scholarly graduate work. This was the cumulative assignment for my Contemporary Critical Theories course; in this assignment we were to examine a cultural artifact through the lens of one of the critical theories we had studied. In the course of those studies, I had noticed that both poststructuralism and ethnic studies shared a connection in their efforts to critically expose and overcome problematic power structures. Here I use a close examination of Napoleon Dynamite to illuminate the contrasts between the two theoretical approaches and, ultimately, to argue that ethnic studies is the more settled, more complete, more helpful response to Western hegemonic narrative than the post-- theories, which tend to perpetuate and/or reify the same uneven societal hierarchies they strive to deconstruct. 

The button below is a link to one of my research products for the Approaches to Research course. This is self-published on medium.com and is meant to be a public-facing discussion of my research. My research centered on questions regarding the unintended consequences of high-stakes standardized testing with a focus on its impact on English instruction and teachers. In this offering, I expose how the mythos of the teacher hero relates to a very specific and flawed view of education, a view which simultaneously fuels and renders untenable our current educational environment of high-stakes standardized testing. 

This last essay is another personal narrative, but this time the focus is my growth as a scholar and an educator during my studies in the online M.A. English program at ASU. This was written at the beginning of my Graduate Capstone Seminar. It lays bare the pained, yet hopeful, circumstances that prompted my return to school, the meaningful moments of growth and preparation I experienced in the program, and the unexpected healing I gained through course-required research.