Teaching Philosophy
“The words on the page are only half the story. The rest is what your bring to the party” — Toni Morrison
I aim for my classroom to be a place without borders, where both my students and myself can bring all that we are to the party, and where our thoughts, works, and intentions extend beyond the confines of the classroom into our everyday actions. I seek to foster an environment of trust, humility, and empowerment where students can recognize themselves as experts in their own languages and lived experiences, and as comfortable novices in academic writing and a great many other genres. I believe that students who can make peace and find comfort in this dual identity—expert and novice—despite its seeming contradictory nature, are best prepared to situate themselves in the future messiness of genres, communities, and life. I see myself as a fellow traveler, all too often repeating the words I wrote for a slug named Mel some years ago (and included on my FiR syllabus)
But in the end it’s all just language. We are what we are because someone said we are. I don’t see why we shouldn’t be the ones to do the saying about ourselves… You are your own language. And you’re the best interpreter of that language we’re ever going to get. (Susie’s Shell Searching Adventure)
I center my pedagogy on helping students breathe life into their work, rather than perform to an audience of one. I believe a world where AI has consumed Standard Written English (SWE) as its own, compels us to take back what we created and the only way to do that is to imbue our work with the human, with our authentic voices, cultural knowledge, and lived experiences. I am reminded of Humpty Dumpty’s line in Through the Looking Glass when he says of language, “The question is, which is to be master? That’s all.” I recognize that my students’ upbringing in a capitalist world has instilled in them the idea that learning is transactional and writing is their bartered good. Many students have only ever known writing to be “mastered” by some other force, be that capitalism, academia, social media algorithms, or now AI. I want to embolden my students to reclaim language for themselves, interpret themselves to others more boldly, and to ultimately be the ones to do the saying about their own lives.
In my quest to embolden students, I seek to minimize the tyranny of grades. Within my classroom, completing assignments practically guarantees one no less than a B+. My grading philosophy is not intended to make my courses easy. Rather, my philosophy is to change the incentive structure so that students feel a desire to complete the work for learning’s sake rather than transact a grade. I want my classroom to be a place that is safe for students to take risks and explore freely. By lessening the punitive function of grades, my hope is that students will feel freer to take those risks.
To further foster a safe environment for exploration, it is important to me to relinquish some authority in the classroom, recognize students for their own expertise, and show sincere empathy for them personally by meeting each student where they are as writers, students, and individuals. I see myself as a fellow traveler, here to guide students on their way up the mountain of learning, and I recognize that traditional power structures can often get in the way of students seeing teachers in that way. For them to trust me and for them to believe in themselves, I argue that we all must be humble enough to recognize ourselves and each other as experts and novices in various genres. In order to effectively situate ourselves in genres and cross genre boundaries, we must engage in negotiation between our own language, lived experience, and expertise, and the agreed upon rules, structures, and authorities of the genre we engage with. I want my students to exit my classroom as experienced negotiators, capable of quickly approximating how best to re-present their language in any genre they might wind up in.
To cultivate skill in negotiation, I strive to make my classroom a safe space for genre exploration, or what I think of as a genreless classroom. In this space, we shed the performative aspect first-year writing and practice inhabiting as many different genres as possible. I owe much of this approach to Dr. Kathleen Yancey, who proposes a new model of composition where students explicitly consider “the issue of intertextual circulation: how what they are composing relates or compares to ‘real world’ genres; [and] to consider what the best medium and the best delivery for such a communication might be.” I want my students to be metacognitively aware of genre as a tool they can wield with intention. I want them to explore how their writing fits or requires adjustment across genres, and then to practice negotiation in order to more effectively and efficiently cross-genres. I do not want to prepare them to write a 10pg essay for an English class that will never be read again; I want to prepare them for the unpredictable, genre-hopping reality they will face as the write throughout their lifetime and within their chosen fields.
Further Reading
Kinloch, Valerie Felita. “Revisiting the Promise of ‘Students’ Right to Their Own Language’: Pedagogical Strategies.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 57, no. 1, 2005, pp. 83–113. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30037899. Accessed 23 Nov. 2025.
Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 56, no. 2, 2004, pp. 297–328. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4140651. Accessed 22 Nov. 2025.