Pedagogy

Course Design

Diversity & Equity Statement

Teaching Positions

Instructor

Writing Seminar II – Thematic Option Honors Program: Impostors: Fictions of Illegitimacy, Illegitimate Fictions, Spring 2023 (in-person)

A writing & literature course emphasizing application of theory & research skills for Honors Freshmen. Designed thematic arc, syllabus, reading list & writing assignments. Held thirty-minute individual tutorials with each student for each of the five assignments. Fine-tuned previously developed syllabus to further emphasize performativity & emphasis on race & gender while still maintaining the difference between impostor syndrome & actual imposture. Texts include Passing (1929), Paris is Burning (1990), Yellow Face (1993), Fun Home (2006), & theories by Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, Frantz Fanon, Sara Ahmed, W.E.B. Du Bois & Cheryl Harris. Substituted Discord for Blackboard to increase class community & counter academic surveillance technology.

Writing Seminar I – Thematic Option Honors Program, Fall 2022 (largely in-person with hybrid option)

This writing course is paired with a first semester survey of literature course in the Honors Program. Designed the syllabus & prompts around developing transferable skills, such as critical thinking & argumentation, as well as the tolerance of paradox, ambiguity & generative failure. Attended linked lecture course weekly to better connect assignments to its reading material & help work through students’ paper ideas. Held thirty-minute individual tutorials with each student for each of the five assignments.

Writing Seminar II – Thematic Option Honors Program: Queer Afterlives: Grieving the Past, Dreaming Livable Futures, Spring 2022 (hybrid Zoom & in-person)

Developed syllabus around the transformative power of grief, particularly from the voices of LGBTQIA+, Black, Indigenous, & disabled writers & activists. Countered oppressive academic surveillance software through use of Discord as substitute for Blackboard. Texts included This Wound is a World, Octavia’s Brood, Don’t Call Us Dead, Silverlake Life: A View from Here, the All My Relations podcast, & Judith Butler’s “Violence, Mourning, Politics.”

Writing Seminar II – Thematic Option Honors Program: Impostors: Fictions of Illegitimacy, Illegitimate Fictions, Spring 2020 (in-person, then Zoom from March)

Designed syllabus around the difference between impostor syndrome & actual imposture with a race & gender focus. Implemented antiracist practices of communal discussion norms & presented the results in a related pedagogy course. Texts included Passing (1929), Watchmen (1986), Yellow Face (1993), Fun Home (2006), & theories by Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, Frantz Fanon, Sara Ahmed, W.E.B. Du Bois, & Cheryl Harris.

Writing Seminar I – Thematic Option Honors Program, Fall 2019 (in-person)

This writing course was paired with a first semester survey of literature course in the Honors Program. Designed the syllabus & prompts around transferable skills of literary analysis & the writing process. Attended linked lecture course weekly to better connect assignments to lecture professor’s reading material & to help work through students’ paper ideas. Held thirty-minute individual tutorials with each student for each of the six assignments.

Writing & Critical Reasoning: Technology & Social Change, Fall 2018-Spring 2019 (in-person)

Developed the teaching & reading materials for a course based on the assigned theme. Fall semester centered digital extremism, such as the so-called “alt-right,” & Spring semester centered intimacy in the digital age, broadly conceived.

Volunteer Instructor

Introduction to Drama – Riverside Pathways Juvenile Facility through the USC Prison Education Project (PEP), Summer 2022 (Zoom)

Designed this seven-week course that introduced students to dramatic literature & a broader understanding of “performance” through three plays: William Shakespeare’s Macbeth (1623; No Fear Shakespeare edition), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1954), & Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog (1992). Delivered play copies to facility & coordinated with the correction officer for the Delta Unit present in each session. Course taught reading strategies, play themes of violence, masculinity & uncertainty, an introduction to performance studies, & how staging enhances meaning through in-class dramatic reading & documentaries & clips from performances inside & outside prison contexts. Course culminated in a final assignment where students created either a short written response on one of the plays, or a rehearsed performance of a scene or behavior studied in class. Final student performances ranged from interactions with their probation officers, their attitudes when arrested, or the behavior of other Delta Unit members.

Teaching Assistant

Literature of Los Angeles, Department of English, Summer 2020 (online through Zoom)

Guest Lecturer

ENGL 491: Senior Seminar—“Narrative Transformations, Translations, and the Art of Adaptation: Shakespeare’s The Tempest as Case Study.” Professor Joseph Boone, March 2021.

Presented research on the racial scientific influences on Percy MacKaye’s masque-adaptation of The Tempest, entitled Caliban by the Yellow Sands, & MacKaye’s own involvement with eugenics to a seminar of senior English majors. Led post-lecture discussion & linked Caliban to other course texts, such as Browning’s “Caliban upon Setebos” & Shakespeare’s original text.

Literature of Los Angeles, Department of English, Summer 2020 (online through Zoom).

Served as guest-lecturer for a section of the course in which I applied Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” to Jake in Chinatown (1974) and expanded on how Jake’s perspective shapes the film’s depiction of violence against women and anti-Asian racism while neglecting echoes of the Chinese Massacre of 1871.