I have taught for over a decade in a variety of institutional settings, including public universities such as the University of South Florida and Western Michigan University, private institutions such as Duquesne University and Wabash College, and even cohorts of medical professionals at the West Penn School of Nursing. During this time, I have received a Lilly Equity and Inclusion Pedagogy Fellowship to introduce inclusion and accessibility in business writing classes. Then, in 2021, the national Writing Across the Curriculum Awards committee recognized my Outstanding Contributions to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Field due to my work fostering students’ writing beyond the classroom to promote social justice.

Due to my feminist and queer pedagogies, my students learn to read closely, to interrogate their assumptions, to empathize with alternative points of view, and to express their arguments within their professional discourse. For example, through discussion I generated a list of students’ assumptions about Arthurian literature before we read the Pearl-Poet’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in which the denizens of castle Hautdesert praise Arthur’s court and exhort Gawain to comport himself in accordance with their expectations of a noble knight. Close reading revealed discrepancies that challenge both the social conventions acknowledged within the narrative, and the expectations students had imposed upon the text. Gawain is about games: the poem revolves around a beheading game that forebodes Gawain’s death, but along his quest this noble knight encounters another game that tests his honor and disrupts assumptions about his sexuality. I introduced students to the constructedness of identity categories and a simplified introduction to Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity. How is Gawain’s masculinity performed? How is it encoded? As students deconstructed identity categories in Gawain and they suggested multiple ways of interpreting interactions between characters, including feminist and homoerotic subtexts, they found themselves participating in another game facilitated by the poem: reading and interpretation is a complex game that is open to play. Students identified multiple, sometimes conflicting reading strategies. Then, I separated the class into small groups, among which they cited textual evidence supplemented by entries from the Middle English Compendium to argue for a particular reading of Gawain. They presented their work to their peers as a means of practicing literary criticism, public speaking, and evaluating arguments, while appreciating the dynamic elements of Middle English literature.

In some of my courses I disrupt the standard teacher-student hierarchy to establish myself as a co-learner along with the students. For example, I demonstrate how to research and write a college essay. In ENG 180: Medieval Magic / Modern Monsters, while performing a close reading of Patience Agbabi’s “The Kiss,” I decided the best way to teach students how to write literary analysis is to do it with them. I started writing an article in stages that I shared with them so the students could follow my model within a similar time frame. First, we read Agababi’s poem together and I proposed an argument about my interpretation of the central metaphor in the text. I invited conversation and disagreement, and explained that I would write the paper with students, meeting all of the same deadlines one week or more before their assignments were due so they could follow my recursive processes. Next, I constructed a working thesis statement and annotated bibliography to show them how to find credible sources. I emphasized the importance of annotating texts that inform their understanding overall, and their papers specifically. Then, I demonstrated how a working thesis statement is helpful for guiding their research, but that it is malleable and ought to change as their thinking evolves. Students noticed that my thesis statement changed over the course of the semester as my argumentative position gained more nuance by engaging with other critical conversations on the intersecting topics. Finally, I drafted and presented my paper a few weeks before their final was due so they saw an example of how to build an argumentative essay in real time. I am transparent with my students about my struggles and strategies so they see that good research and writing are not a matter of talent. These are skills that one can learn and perfect through experience. My students become better communicators and scholars—not by writing for me—but by writing with me. This process demystifies writing and research practices, and it empowers students to work alongside me as equal collaborators in our class discussions and writing assignments. Additionally, students witness firsthand the intersections of my teaching and research.

Moreover, my classroom is a safe space in which to do the difficult work of engaging with the intersections of literature and contemporary social issues. I provide students a traditional humanities education combined with an awareness of ongoing critical conversations about race, class, gender, and sexuality. For example, I designed an argumentative writing course for nursing students, which I supplemented with articles from nursing journals. I had been warned before starting my position at the West Penn School of Nursing that their cohorts have a history of disliking humanities courses, so I tailored the reading assignments to address issues relevant to their field. At first, students bristled because they were performing close readings of texts, such as feminist articles encouraging nurses to acknowledge the profession’s history of civic duty and support for marginalized groups. Although the majority of the class bemoaned some of the topics, a few students acknowledged that they were grateful to learn more about their future patients and the social conditions that influence their interactions with healthcare professionals. Many students constructed research papers supporting preventative medicine orchestrated through community outreach, as opposed to the more costly and less effective acute healthcare system that currently dominates American medicine. Regardless of their reactions to the course, all of my students contributed to a working definition of nursing that identifies their profession beyond a set of protocols to include empathy and civic duty.

Finally, I prepare my students to succeed in their academic careers overall. For example, in my general Composition course, I do not impose MLA style on my students as is standard in most English courses; rather, I work closely with students to recursively develop a research paper within their intended academic major or minor. The benefits of assignments tailored to students’ interests is that each learns the citation style for their discipline, and they immediately learn some of the current journals and conversations in their respective fields. As a result, when students leave my first-year writing classes, they are informed and confidently employing the professional conventions of their discipline.

In each of my classes, I identify my students as early-career professionals by validating their contributions to ongoing debates. I facilitate their professional development by empowering students to identify topics for our class discussions based on reading assignments, then, I employ lecture to situate their contributions within critical conversations. This methodology actively involves students in processes of close reading, critical thinking, argumentative writing, and persuasive speaking— skills that make my students competitive candidates for diverse positions amid a difficult job market and selective graduate programs.