Teaching begins with an inquiry in how to see. It begins in how to attend to language, to others, and to what emerges when we slow down long enough to notice.
My teaching is grounded in a practice of attention. With a background in poetry and creative writing, and shaped by a scholarly focus on the ethics of seeing, I approach composition and literature as ways of learning how to perceive more carefully, and more fully. My courses are purposefully designed in a way that invites students to look, listen, and to linger long enough for meaning to emerge. In my classrooms, reading and writing are not simply academic tasks, but practices that sharpen perception and cultivate responsibility to what, and to whom, we encounter.
The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is a Minority-Serving Institution, and the majority of the students I teach are balancing their academic lives alongside work and family; many are the first in their family to participate in higher education. Some arrive unsure about whether academic spaces were designed with them in mind. I aim to create classrooms that are true communities, and that project both rigor and compassion. I am intentional about making academic expectations transparent, and I ensure that rhetorical flexibility is a core facet of my teaching; students are able to conceptualize academic language as one set of purposeful choices, instead of a judgement against their own cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Students in my class are invited into intellectual work through patience and practice rather than pressure.
In my courses, writing is understood as a process rather than a performance, and I encourage engagement with the material substance of language, as well as the power of words to shape thoughts, feelings, and actions. Drawing from my background in creative writing, I emphasize drafting, revision, and reflection as acts of discovery and transformation. Students experience the relationship between writing and thinking, as well as embodied composition as a way of seeing, of noticing patterns, gaps, and connections that were not visible at first glance. I design courses with clear scaffolding, models, and transparent criteria to provide the structure that allows students to take intellectual risks and gain confidence in their own voices. I believe that the cultivation of voice, through language and through active practices of perception, can lead students into a deeper understanding of themselves. Writing becomes a way of following one’s words into the world.
To that end, I teach composition and literature as closely related forms of inquiry. In writing courses, students develop rhetorical awareness, learning how audience, context, and purpose shape meaning across academic and public settings. In literature courses, close reading becomes an ethical practice: an invitation to slow down, attend to language, and remain open to multiple interpretations. Across both, students are asked to support their ideas with evidence and to read generously and critically. They are asked to connect concepts to their lived experience, and to understand interpretation as a relational act rather than a search for definitive answers. I create multimodal assignments that span diverse genres so that students engage critical thinking and rhetorical strategies through various contextual lenses. Students in my classes write letters to the editor and to political representatives. They create visual texts such as infographics, collages and photographs. One assignment which has garnered particular enthusiasm is a podcast where students discuss how ancient texts relate to modern life, or offer analysis of a social issue and its effects.
The research I conducted for my dissertation revolves around the ethics of seeing, which further informs my pedagogy across disciplines. My research pursued questions about how perception shapes understanding, how what we notice—and what we overlook—influences the stories we tell and the arguments we make. In the classroom, this translates into an emphasis on careful observation and thoughtful questioning, as well as sustained engagement with and a close reading of texts. Students are encouraged to consider not only what a text says, but how it asks to be read. They are asked to contemplate what responsibilities might be attributed to us as readers and observers not only of texts made of words, but of the world at large.
Text selection similarly reflects my commitment to attention and encounter. I balance canonical works with contemporary literature and diverse voices, in order to create opportunities for recognition and expansion. In a world literature course, we might read Indigenous Mojave writer Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem to deepen our dialogue about the nature of the world and the human being. We might analyze the Bhagavad Gita and the Daodejing alongside Star Wars. In composition courses, we often read narratives such as Malcolm X’s “A Homemade Education” and Sandra Cisneros’s “Only Daughter” to examine how personal relationships with learning and language take shape through individual lived experiences. Works such as Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray open a space for thinking about landscape, class structure, and ways that the personal is political. In my courses, reading and literature are spaces for encountering historical, cultural and ethical difference and they are, above all, spaces for practicing the kind of careful seeing that extends beyond the classroom.
Central to this work is a generative and equitable classroom ecosystem. I am committed to creating environments that invite and encourage students to test ideas aloud, listen attentively to one another, and to participate in authentic dialogue with an open mind. I incorporate multiple forms of engagement, including small-group conversation, informal, reflective writing, and collaborative brainstorming. Using these kinds of varied modes helps ensure that participation and insight are not limited to the most immediate or confident voices in the room.
Like reading and writing, assessment is treated as a process. Through formative feedback, numerous revision opportunities, and reflective writing, students are encouraged to envision their own learning over time and use metacognitive skills to understand how composition practices and certain habits of mind work best for them. Rather than functioning as a final judgment, assessment becomes another way of paying attention; students learn to recognize growth, effort, and emerging clarity.
I have taught in face-to-face and online formats; in all modalities, I prioritize clarity, presence, and continuity. Especially in web-based settings, careful course design and communication help create a sense of shared intellectual space, allowing students to focus on the work of reading and writing as practices of attention. I treat both online and live courses as exceptional opportunities to practice rhetorical awareness and strategies, and I demonstrate how students can tailor their voices for various mediums of communication within the framework of the course.
Above all, I hope that students gain not only stronger composition and close reading skills but a deeper confidence in their ability to see and think with originality and purpose. I hope that students leave my course with a greater sense of the world as text and with their own voices as central to its ongoing creation.
My teaching experience spans composition, rhetoric, and literature, in both classroom and online environments.
First-Year Composition (College Composition I & II)
Honors Rhetoric
Discipline-Specific Composition (Science Link courses)
Corequisite Reading & Writing Laboratories
World Literature (Antiquity to Early Modern)
Asynchronous and web-based composition courses
Multimodal writing and digital rhetoric
For a complete list of courses and academic appointments, please see my CV.