With nearly 10 years of community college teaching experience, I teach first and second year students with varying majors, so I strive to cultivate an interdisciplinary approach to teaching writing that stresses collaboration and critical thinking—skills required of all writers in virtually all fields of study. Influenced by pragmatism and a number of anti-racist and culturally relevant and affirming pedagogies, I hold that the purpose of rhetoric courses is to teach students to communicate, mediate, and enact change within their societies. Because I believe public institutions should be comprised of diverse perspectives and open to critical dissent, I use metacognitive and collaborative strategies to encourage my students to question their own assumptions and biases and the assumptions and biases of those in power and the societies they inhabit, including those of the institution itself. Moreover, I stress the importance of context and audience in every class I teach to help my students develop rhetorical fluency in a variety of real-world situations. 

    To apply these theoretical approaches, I employ a high challenge, high support andragogy founded on an asset-based mindset wherein I encourage my students to build on their preexisting strengths and experiences to contribute to the social formation of written knowledge. I do this by assigning challenging topics with real-world application value and using strategies such as low-stake formative assignments, scaffolding and revision, just-in-time remediation, extensive feedback and rubrics, and guided collaborative assignments to ensure that my students are in a conversation with me and their peers throughout the entire writing process. Through this process, students strengthen their critical thinking skills, learn to question and defend their beliefs, experience collaborative knowledge construction, and hone their writing skills, all while learning about context and audience through an application of these concepts to real-world issues.

  To foster anti-racist and culturally affirming pedagogical praxis, I have participated in projects that reinforce my andragogy, promote student engagement, and reduce barriers to student success. For example, I am a coordinator and English instructor for the Puente Project, a transfer program focused on giving voice to underrepresented groups and celebrating Latinx culture and literature. Puente also encourages student involvement in campus life, and Puente students are often active advocates for social justice on campus and in the community. Additionally, I helped develop a corequisite support course for transfer-level composition to reduce the time students unnecessarily spend in pre-transfer courses. Both of these projects have built-in collaborative support components, such as mentoring and one-on-one conferencing, and have proven to increase student success by lessening time to transfer and increasing throughput, allowing more students to reach their goals while also teaching the power of a supportive learning community. 

I aspire to continue to teach my students to create and use written knowledge to not only express themselves but to also practice introspection and use what they learn to advocate for themselves and others in this world.