I am committed to the teacher-scholar model and see my pedagogy and my research as informing and enriching each other. In my classes, I foreground the relationship between humanistic methods and larger questions of social structures and power, guiding students to understand how all texts—not only those they read, but also those they produce—can act in and on the world. I simultaneously work to craft classroom environments that empower students as thinkers and writers by giving them craft-based instruction and practice in developing writing in the genres that are important to their academic and professional aspirations. At Florida State University, I regularly teach undergraduate courses on science fiction as well as the survey of literary history since 1800, as well as graduate seminars in environmental humanities and genre studies. I have previously developed and taught a number of undergraduate courses at Southwestern University and Winston-Salem State University, including American literary history, gateway courses to methods and concepts in literary studies, environmental literature, science fiction film, Afrofuturism and Black speculative fiction, and visionary fiction.
My pedagogical philosophy is structured around three key values: questions; connections; and community. These values inform all of the courses I teach. By questions, I mean that I create engaging pedagogical structures that cultivate intellectual curiosity and excitement, encouraging students to develop and pursue the questions and projects that matter most to them. Across all of my courses, I emphasize generative questions over authoritative or absolute answers as key to humanistic habits of mind; in graduate courses, I focus on helping students prepare for dissertation research by developing their own research questions within the context of my course. This focus on empowering student inquiry leads naturally to my emphasis on connections: students develop the questions that matter to them as they learn to make substantive and motivated links across disciplines, between academia and real-world issues, and (especially in graduate courses) between their own scholarly interests and ongoing and timely scholarly conversations and debates. All of this work proceeds through ongoing processes of collaboration and feedback in scholarly community, by which I mean both that I build strong relationships of trust and support with students and that I foster a sense of challenging but inviting academic responsiveness among students: my courses create intentional structures for robust and open discussion, build students’ willingness to enter that discussion by honoring multiple forms of participation, and scaffold up to ensuring that students experience the full process of scholarly inquiry, including dissemination to an interested audience.
These commitments extend as well into my support of undergraduate and graduate research. When I work with MA, MFA, and PhD students, I emphasize dialogue, reflection, and reading for scholarly interlocutors as well as "mentor texts," prompting students to articulate their research more confidently, learn to frame and structure their interventions by attending to scholars they admire, and situate their work clearly in the field. When I work with undergraduate researchers, I similarly train them not only to develop research skills and habits but to cultivate a sense of themselves as actively contributing to the academic conversations that interest them. My work with undergraduate research has encompassed overseeing critical and creative honors projects at Florida State University and Southwestern University, bringing students on as research assistants via the UROP program at Florida State, mentoring undergraduates preparing to present their research at academic conferences at Winston-Salem State University, and working with undergraduate collaborators at Southwestern University, the latter of which was featured in Grist magazine and has since resulted in collaborative conference presentations and a peer-reviewed journal article and book chapter.