Current Courses

In Fall 2022, I’m teaching two courses at Emory University:

Short Statement of Teaching Philosophy

I teach primarily with a “writing across the disciplines” approach, which focuses on how writing practices such as citing and drafting processes vary with academic discipline. It’s also concerned with how these practices are shaped by, and continually re-shape, those disciplines’ writing-related values—what counts as “good” writing by way of formal features like organization, sentence structure, narrative quality, and evidence.

My pedagogy draws from anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s concept of propulsive “friction” between ways of knowing: I bring seemingly unlike materials together from my different disciplinary backgrounds so students can put different terms to habitual activities and concepts to see them anew. This teaches students to situate knowledges from multiple traditions and negotiate the balance between reading and representing others’ work accountably on its own terms and identifying what’s useful there for their purposes.

Students in my classes learn how to anticipate and write for multiple audiences; how to recognize, access, and represent information from reliable sources; and how to dwell in the boundaries between genres while shifting them. They translate forms they may already know how to write to ones that may not be as familiar, while reflecting on the disciplinary identities they claim and continuously re-write. This provides students space to grapple with the implications of borrowing methods, the rhetorical choices we make with data, and how analytic processes most often used for pattern-seeking analysis and surveillance can be useful for remix, intervention, and resistance.

Selected Recent Courses

Writing Center work

As part of an appointment at Northeastern University’s Writing Center, I have facilitated working groups for PhD students in the disciplines, especially the sciences. In this pilot program, I coached group members on revising their drafts, developing their composition processes, and offering peer-review feedback to one another on their writing. I also served as a Writing Center consultant, holding one-on-one sessions, in-person and online, with writers from undergraduate students to faculty.