Teaching

In my classes, students engage with literary texts through practices that enhance their critical thinking skills, develop their command over the techniques of persuasive academic writing, and situate them in collaboration with a larger intellectual community.

Active Critical Thinking

Critical thinking is the most important skill students will learn in an English course. I consider it my primary responsibility not to teach books but to teach reading. While many college students will eagerly offer their conclusions about a particular text, it takes practice to articulate how they had arrived there and why they had chosen their interpretation over a number of possible alternative explanations. For that reason, I make close reading exercises a core component of my classroom. In the first weeks of my upper-level survey course “Contemporary American Writers,” I had passages on hand in each class session. After asking the class about the first impressions of the text, I would write on the board particular themes or problems that they had noticed. In small groups, students would select notable patterns and contrasts in the vocabulary and imagery that might explain their broader first reading of the text. In looking more carefully at the minute details of the text, students could either find evidence to further develop their initial reading and refine their argument or encounter productive complications that might lead them into further analysis.

I conduct these exercises frequently in my classrooms, with minor adjustments. In my Writing 101 course, for instance, I begin not with small group work on literary texts, but rather with an interactive full-class exercise on visual documents like photographs and films. Projecting a photo onto a screen, I ask students individually to write what they see, with particular emphasis on formal details that they might also use with literature: patterns, contrasts, subjects, and focus. Together as a class, we begin with an objective description or summary, then move to more subjective judgments about mood, tone, emotion and intention, and finally conjecture about the broader thematic concepts. Occasionally I will conclude by mentioning the historical or social context, and ask students how this new information reinforces or alters their reading. Through this exercise, students become familiar with the various levels of analysis that they will use when writing their own close readings, from the most basic description of form to higher-order discussions of morality, philosophy, politics, and history. Along the way, they will also recognize the need to reassess their original assumptions and to adjust their claims when they encounter new evidence.

Writing in the Classroom

Students develop as critical thinkers through their writing. I believe that we can only think as far as we can write. For this reason, I also give the fundamental skills of academic writing—from brainstorming to drafting to revision to workshopping—a central position in the classroom. I ask students to see writing not as a communicative tool and not as an impediment, but caution that they can only make use of this tool if they practice it often. At the beginning of each Writing 101 class session, I would ask students to free-write for five minutes. I usually provide a prompt, such as to write on an issue they encountered in reading that day’s assignments or to summarize a lesson from last class. In doing so, they not only build their retention of the course material but also learn to make writing a daily habit, regardless of deadlines. I stress that, in the humanities, we write not because we know something with certainty, but because we feel we have encountered a problem or have become stuck in our thinking process. Writing picks up on these impasses and turns them into material for further analysis. In addition to daily in-class writing, students are also asked to write longer online reading responses. These help students to log their thought processes and become useful resources when they have to write a literary analysis paper. Finally, students spend at least two full class sessions workshopping each other’s work and providing constructive criticism to their peers. They also submit multiple drafts of their work so that they can incorporate feedback.

Participating in a Scholarly Community

In order to achieve fully the first of these goals, students have to recognize first that the impact of their work extends beyond themselves. As readers and writers, they belong not only to a scholarly community but to a community of socially engaged adults. While I am delighted to see my students excel in the classroom, I know that the skills of critical thinking and persuasive argument will serve students best if they can practice them in the wider world. This begins by asking them to communicate directly and respectfully with others in the class. Students in the first few weeks of my class introduce themselves not only to the class in general, but also personally to me and to one another. Students are more likely to be generous and invested interlocutors if they first get to know the personalities and preferences of their peers to whom they address themselves, and I encourage this throughout the semester with frequent small group exercises and direct, one-on-one collaborations. In an evaluation, a former student of mine praised the “healthy class environment” and described our class as “one of the most inclusive” that they had had at Duke. Students can only fully practice their skills as readers and writers when they can confidently express themselves among others, and I believe that an inclusive classroom and healthy class environment gives them that assurance. This sense of mutual esteem ensures that seminar discussions and in-class writing workshops proceed efficiently, certainly, but I also believe that it engenders in students a deeper level of investment and even enthusiasm in the work that they share with others. I hope that by collaborating with others to analyze literary texts, students will feel empowered to work with each other as engaged and informed members of society to scrutinize and confront broader structural issues.

I welcome every opportunity to improve as a teacher and to learn from my fellow educators. In addition to completing a Certificate in College Teaching in the Graduate School at Duke University, I am currently participating in a series of "teaching triangles" that allow me to receive feedback on my pedagogy from other graduate instructors.