Teaching Statement
My classroom activities respond to the pace of a rapidly advancing digital and global world by using multimodal digital platforms to instill deep thinking, creation, revision, and collaborative critique skills in my students. I build in class time for them to revise their work, to experiment with different technological tools, and advise them towards more thorough thinking of the relationship between not just aesthetics and politics but also content and form. For instance, in a creative writing workshop, I introduced students to the concept of nonlinear narratives as a tool deployed by more than one genre of writing. Building off past discussions of nonlinear writing such as Bhanu Kapil’s Ban en Banlieu (2015), I asked students to consider the ways in which nonlinear writing was essential to complicating the power dynamics entangled in ethnographic practices for Kapil. I compelled them to think of elements of their writing that might necessitate nonlinear forms. With this context, I guided students through the use of the digital hypertext platform, Twine. In a short tutorial, I reviewed the basic elements of branching and pathing on the platform before prompting students to consider how Twine might alter the format and content of their written assignment from the night before, which was a short linear narrative with a conventional beginning, middle, and end. I tasked students with rewriting their assignment with two additional branching paths, and asked them to apply their new drafts to Twine. At the end of class, I invited volunteers to project what they created onto the board. With each presentation, I asked the class to consider the ways in which each student uniquely interpreted nonlinear writing and to think of other platforms that might help them further meet the aesthetic goals of their projects.
Multimodal practices in the classroom have the capability of teaching students the complex literacies of race and technology. In my classes, students work towards this understanding by reading across disciplines and media, from literary theory to video essays, to identify how arguments are formed and the shapes they take. To explore the roles of race, nationality, and memoir in Theresa Hak Khung Cha’s Dictee (1982), I show excerpts of performing artist, Soomi Kim’s “Dictee: bells fall a peal to sky.” Using Dictee as source text, the play moves through elements of autobiographical telling through mother and daughter figures that comments on authorship and artistic process. While contending with both works may prove challenging, I enjoin texts across various media to compel students to talk about the tonal textures of race and politics, which may be difficult to do in traditional close readings alone. By naming the narrative choices of Kim’s play in contrast to the original work that it is based upon, students can identify key ideas about multiplicity of identities, gendered labor, and artistic autonomy as it pertains to Asian American identity. Students reflect on these texts to produce critical and creative responses that mimic some crucial aspects of their experimental forms. In subsequent classes, students are reminded that their strengthened literacy in race and technological forms can help them think through their own projects.
My pedagogy is reflective of the rigorous intersections of different disciplines that inform my approach to creative writing and literature. These intersections occur through teaching eclectic student communities whose varied backgrounds and interests demand that we as teachers flex our ties to traditional instruction within our disciplines. These connections are the groundwork for fostering depth in students’ academic and creative participation as we train them to be makers instead of passive receivers of information. As the challenges of teaching across disciplines and media grow, such connections are vital for reinvigorating students’ relationship to not only creative writing and literature but also their critical agency in the greater world.