Teaching Philosophy
I have worked in various teaching capacities: as a tutor for Fordham's Writing Center, advisor for Fordham’s Office of Prestigious Fellowship, teaching assistant for Clark University, volunteer literacy tutor for a second-grade public school classroom, and even a soccer coach for middle school athletes.
From these diverse experiences, I have observed that students of various ages, disciplines, and cultural backgrounds tend to learn best when their own views and motivations are both respected and encouraged.
Currently, in the undergraduate classroom, I urge students to dedicate their time and energy into researching topics that spark their intellectual curiosity.
Motivating students to achieve excellence by pursuing topics they are passionate about is a pedagogical strategy that I have learned to trust and establishes the discipline of writing and literary studies as innately interdisciplinary and student-centered.
My Courses
Texts & Contexts: Ghosts, Hauntings, and the Supernatural
Why do we love (and fear) stories with ghosts? What can we learn about emotion, injustice, oppression, history, childhood, and trauma from reading the supernatural? In this course, we will examine ghosts as a literary motif and as a vehicle for individual reflection and cultural analysis. We will read a selection of novels, essays, plays, and poems. Together we will practice techniques of close reading, productive discussion, and argumentation. We will also develop our abilities to think, speak, and write critically about the interplay between a text and its contexts. Possible authors include: Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Brontë, Henry James, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Bruce Joel Rubin, Helen Oyeyemi, Yangsze Choo, Carla Freccero, and Stephen Graham Jones. (Scheduled for Fall 2022)
Texts & Contexts: Running in Literature
From classical antiquity to contemporary times, the sport of running has been a topic of much interest, raising important questions about the body, gender, athletic identity, ceremony, and isolation. Through close and comparative readings, this course analyzes how running appears in various historical contexts and genres—including poems, novels, memoirs, films, short stories, and travelogues. Students practice literary interpretation and argumentation through discussion, presentations, and research papers. (Summer 2018)
Introduction to College Writing
As an introduction to college writing, this course reviewed instruction in sentence and paragraph construction, reading comprehension skills and analysis, the basic principles of grammar with an emphasis on diagnosing and solving persistent problems, and principles of argumentation and evidence. Weekly assignments and regular grammar exercises to build confidence and competence in college writing. (Fall 2018; Scheduled for Fall 2022)
Composition and Rhetoric
Intensive training in the principles of effective expository writing, with an emphasis on sound logic, correct grammar, and persuasive rhetoric. Introduces research techniques, including use of the library, conventions and principles of documentation, analysis of sources, and ethics of scholarly research. (Summer 2021-online, Spring 2019, Fall 2018, Fall 2017)
Honors Writing Intensive
This course is designed to help honors students develop the skills necessary for writing college-level academic essays. We discuss various techniques for developing original, logically sound, and well-argued research papers such as the known-new contract, the uneven u body paragraph structure, and retrospective outlining. Students demonstrate an understanding of these skills in their final research paper, which challenges them to rewrite the legacy of a public figure of their own choosing. In this course, we also workshop essays assigned in other honors classes at Fordham Lincoln Center. This peer review method allows students to practice evaluating academic writing, responding to feedback on essays, and implementing strategic revisions. (Fall 2021)
Honors Speech and Rhetoric
In this course, we think critically about the underlying principles and theories of rhetoric, what Aristotle calls “the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion.”
Together we evaluate writings and presentations by a variety of rhetoricians, discussing what makes rhetoric necessary, effective, and engaging. Although rhetorical skills are often discussed in terms of formal argumentation and presentation, they are also used in more free-form and flexible modes of communication such as podcasts, interviews, and seminar discussions. Thus, during this semester, each student is required to reflect on a persuasive work of their own choosing and then lead class discussion on its logic and rhetorical techniques. For their final project, they create their own TED Talk, a brief recorded presentation that engages solutions to specific problem, skill, historical event, or cultural phenomena of cultural importance today.