[Not a fan, this morning, of my voice in this one, but I suppose that’s what our workshop is for. I’ve been writing too many conference papers and need to shake the academese.]

The peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece were on to something. While I can’t walk with every class, I invoke our ambulatory forebears to point up the fact that thinking never happens in a vacuum. Whatever we mean by “literature,” the practices it comprises, whether at point of production or reception, are at the very least embodied and situated practices. This emphasis on thought as an irreducibly mediated experience lives at the core of my pedagogy, and it animates what I consider a tactical philosophy of teaching: a set of broadly applicable tools kept close at hand to either demystify or ramify, as needed. Few concepts are as universally accessible as body and place, and given the diversity of subjects, contexts, and mandates represented in my teaching portfolio—from introductory community college courses for students ill-served by their high school years to seminars aimed at advanced English majors with graduate aspirations—I’ve found that the fundamentals of this approach consistently ring true. In each case, I’m asking students to pay attention to their own attention, and I hope, in cultivating self-conscious engagement with cultural productions, to leave them slightly better managers of their minds. [Thinking of making this point the animating sentiment of a more casual–and, I hope, readable–revision that dwells more explicitly on teaching introductory writing.]

Being a scholar of cities affords special opportunity to build situation into my classes—or rather to open them toward the already built situation in which they take place—and I’ve been seizing chances to work alfresco since my earliest forays as an instructor. In my seminar Shadow Cities: Literary Alterity and Urban Otherworlds, I supplement traditional assignments (designed to inculcate conventional but necessary academic skills such as close reading) with what I term “literary fieldwork.” The latter might entail adopting an existing though unfamiliar genre and writing in the wake of one of our authors (students are invited, for instance, to “exhaust a place” in the spirit of Georges Perec, and to document their noctivagations à la Dickens’s “Night Walks”), or it can involve more freeform excursions to catalogue the subterranean, invent histories of urban hellmouths, and report on what Marc Augé calls the “non-places” of postmodernity (transit spaces, lobbies, waiting rooms, roadway medians, and the like).

Intended to open the sensorium and expand the attunement of literary inquiry, fieldwork has proven popular. “For a research class,” wrote one student afterwards, “I thought the fieldwork was an excellent component.” But it also complements and complicates the traditional understanding of humanities research, not to mention the tools used to conduct and present that research. Mapping is a case in point. While I employed digital maps to align readings, discussions, and exercises during a summer spent on-site for Writing London (lecturing to students as we walked, for example, the routes taken in Mrs. Dalloway), my urban literature courses now ask students to progressively assemble individualized city exploration itineraries, charting their own links between site and content. The semester culminates with an exchange of projects, as students follow in their partners’ footsteps, annotating itineraries as they go and then reporting on the experience during our final meeting. Apart from being an excuse to send one another on adventures, the exercise enables critical reflection on the experiential aspects of literature—as, again, an endeavor at once embodied and situated—and it underscores the effectiveness, for me, of social pedagogy.

I was teaching first year writing at Florida International University in the fall of 2017 when I noticed many of my students having trouble with concision. Their prose was bloated with redundant phrases and awkward, practically satirically academic diction. One day in class I was demonstrating how this language could be deflated and simplified by showing an anonymous example, extracting the underlying meaning, and rewording it to be as direct as possible. At the end of the demonstration a student raised her hand and said, “My teacher in high school told us to add more words to make our writing sound smarter.”

I was shocked. I had to take a step back and change my approach. I told them that concision is a prime virtue in expository writing, that when choosing between ways to express an idea, you should almost always choose the most direct and concise method.

But in the back of my mind, something else was going on. I hadn’t been teaching for very long then and it hadn’t yet occurred to me that beyond teaching good writing habits and skills, it was also my job to dispel harmful writing notions. It took me a few years outside my lucky – privileged – education to really understand how routinely the educational system fails students in the United States. One aspect of this failure I’ve found is consistently poor writing education.

I find that students reach the university level with either no effective writing education or some strange mixture of negative associations and bad advice. The bad advice can be as direct as “use more words so you sound smarter” or “an essay should have five paragraphs regardless of length,” but the negative associations are more abstract and seem socially, rather than institutionally, enforced. The general sense my students seem to have is that academic writing is esoteric, boring, highly formal, and almost bureaucratically rules-driven – not to mention utterly divorced from their, or anyone’s, real lives. The truth, of course, is precisely the opposite.

My goal in teaching is to emphasize to students that all people, by virtue of being able to speak a language, are inherently expert communicators. Their particular methods of communication may be particular to their familial, sociopolitical, and geographic context, but the language they possess is just as valid and viable for writing effectively as any other. I try to deconstruct and eliminate the so-called writing rules typical of traditional academic gatekeeping and return written expression to its human, ground level. What kinds of things are the students interested in saying? How do they normally say those things?

From there I think it’s possible to illustrate the power of writing not as a formalized process for fitting experience into the “correct” box, but learning what you already know, identifying what you don’t, and realizing an ideal or close to ideal structure for expressing what you want to say. I start with basic principles of written clarity – precise diction, paragraph structure – and expand on these ideas with project-relevant assignments so students can use these tools to explore issues relevant to their lives.

Want to talk about your grandfather’s role in enabling your family’s immigration? Tell me specific city names, describe the specific smells of his cooking, help me follow a story chronologically. Want to argue who the best basketball player of all time is? Make sure you clearly state your criteria, handle each one in its own paragraph.

By starting with student interest and their natural methods of expression, then showing them how they can refine their own thoughts through the power of draft-based writing, I hope to sidestep the restrictive confusions they’ve been taught or simply absorbed, and show students that whatever they want to express, and wherever they hope to express it, writing is powerful a tool for refining and structuring thought.

At the beginning of the semester, during introductions, I usually hand out a letter I’ve written to the students, describing the writing course and my goals in designing it, what I’m excited for, what I promise to do to support them as they learn, and I read it aloud, word for word. (“If I’m going to talk the talk, I need to walk the walk,” I will tell them, reciting from the letter. “If I’m getting paid to teach you writing, it makes sense that I share my writing with you.”) In the letters they write back to me by the end of that class, students often express surprise about the ways in which my letter didn’t sound “like writing,” but like a person talking. This becomes a point of departure to explore genre and audience expectation: If all texts are written by people, to people, why should some writing hide the fact? What about the syntax, punctuation, or diction might make a passage sound more spoken or more written?

Because writing often evolves in startling and unexpected ways, my teaching plans must engage students in acts of writing, and must be flexible enough to notice and respond to teachable moments as they arise. Active listening – saying back what I understand as the heart of what’s been said, in a tone of curiosity or uncertainty (a …?) – is a core practice that I use in a variety of contexts to guide students to the edge of their understanding, and which I encourage students to practice in responding to each other. In response to a memory they are rendering on the page, active listening can help students see where they’ve merely implied what actually happened, and where there’s room – and audience interest – to expand or deepen their description. In response to a research project, it can help both students and me learn more about sources’ arguments and rhetorical aims, not only articulating and clarifying what is known, but also, through repeated queries, reaching toward new connections.

My lesson plans often involve having students bring in some writing they’ve prepared at home, and then engaging in some solo work on it that prepares them for a second task they will engage in as part of a stable working group. For example, students might bring in a list of questions raised by a text they’ve read, and spend 5 minutes sorting the questions according to how they might be answered (e.g. by close reading, by factual research, by extended reasoning); in groups, they can then work together to answer the most immediately solvable questions, and identify questions that could seed a successful essay. During the solo portion, I participate in the same task whenever possible: not only does it aid in adjusting my timing, but I want to signal that I value the work, and since I do value the work, I also want to benefit from it myself. During the group portion, I float from group to group, listening for opportunities to advise, adjust, and make connections. As more than one faculty observer has noted when visiting my class, this approach allows me to fit in a great deal of teaching, at moments when individual students are primed for it, in relatively small amounts of time.

When, as often happens, someone has not done the homework, I try to prepare an alternate activity for the first ten minutes of class that will enable participation in the group; and because some individuals and some groups work more quickly than others, I prepare an extension activity if they finish. The idea in both cases is to counter a possible misperception that what I’m assigning is The Way to Learn to Write. There is always more to learn, and more to do. Similarly, I always try to let students know why I am assigning the work I assign – including the caveats that there is always more than one reason (we don’t have time in a 15-week semester for single-reason activities), and that one recurring reason for my writing exercises is to generate surprising outcomes. If they can find another good way to achieve the goals I’ve laid out, I’m happy to learn from them, and possibly to incorporate it into the next revision of that lesson plan.

A specific way I try to make my goals explicit is through the course site, where I post my lesson plans and assignments, projecting them on an overhead screen to discuss and field questions. Publicly sharing what I hope to achieve helps me and the students to be aware of how much we must get through, and challenges us: if we do make a change, it must be justifiable. The site also emphasizes the ways in which our writing projects are interlinked: first with planned hyperlinks between pages, then with stored and comparable revision histories of pieces the students shape over time, and finally with searchable tags that students add in preparation for their final reflections.

Perhaps most importantly, at the core of my teaching philosophy is an awareness that building expertise involves a shift in perception: where the novice sees isolated acts and instructions, the expert sees purposeful patterns. Composition and rhetoric has given me a vocabulary that guides my choices and attention, and one of my roles as a teacher is to share that vocabulary and what it helps us see. But all of us, as learners, can reflect back and name to each other the patterns we notice in reading and in writing, in processes and products, so we might notice differently next time.

My son, a November baby, entered preschool at 2-years-old. He was so curious, with wide blue eyes and a secret smile, but very young. Over the year, I heard reports from his teachers. “He doesn’t make eye contact.” “He has a hard time with transitions, when directed.” They tossed around the word ‘autism’ and suggested an evaluation. So, at just turned 3, Will was put through a series of tests, from a psychologist and social worker, to determine causation. We braced for the outcome. The diagnosis? Our son was ‘fine’. He didn’t make eye contact, the psychologist confirmed, because he was learning the letters on the wall, and at two, he had taught himself to read. He didn’t like transitions because he was so deeply engaged in what he was doing that he couldn’t move on until he saw his task through. What the psychologist said then stuck with me until this day (sixteen years later). “School will most likely not reward your son.” She said sympathetically. “But I hope life will.” My son is now 18, in college — wonderful, kind, social and academically engaged in his game design major. But he suffered through the years. For instance, in first grade he begged me, day after day, not to go to school because the teacher spent so much time sounding out letters. I coaxed him, and he complied, and I carry the guilt of that.

I share this story because it and the many stories of my four children’s educational experiences, along with similar ones shared by my students, have informed my teaching philosophy. Beginning preschool, my son was curious and engaged in his own way, and yet he was seen foremost as non-compliant because he didn’t want to move on when instructed. What I found from this and other incidents (e.g., my first-born left class when he was bored and wouldn’t come back) was that school from Pre-K to 12^th grade was structured to reward compliance and appeared ill-equipped to foster authentic engagement in non-compliant’ students, ironically making those students even less likely to comply meaningfully. More so, schools rarely adequately determined why students might be non-compliant, and too often non-compliance was categorized as behavioral issues.

Ironically, my sons did well by school measurements, but still were not fully invested in their learning experiences. My oldest saw high school as something to be endured so he could play football, unless some special teacher stimulated his interest. My other son watched cooking videos when he was supposed to be engaged in Do Nows for Math. Their friends would joke about the books they were assigned and the many creative ways they could avoid reading them and still do well in the class, or how homework ‘sharing’ was commonplace. (And to quell potential assumptions, these were academically achieving students in one of New York City’s Specialized High Schools.) Sitting at a school leadership meeting, I listened as the principal told us that cheating had gotten so bad, that they were relaxing deadlines. My third and most compliant, followed rules, got good grades but couldn’t put two Spanish words together in conversation with me, until two years of study.

After years of watching my sons’ levels of engagement rise and fall like pediatric seismographs, I returned to school for my PhD — not for English but for Literacy, because I came to believe, it is not primarily the content we teach students that matters most, but how we teach students that will foster deep learning. And while teachers might hyper-focus on quantifiable, measurably cognitive skills, I embraced an inquiry into the metacognitive stimuli which make students want to learn. Curiosity, Resilience, Perseverance, and most importantly to me, Interest. In my mind the point is not to create compliant students, but self-actuating life-long learners, the kind of learners who grab hold of an idea and want to know more, not students who find creative ways to avoid effort and still get good grades, or who don’t remember what they have learned six months later.

But how often do we as teachers, mistake compliance for engagement? And more deeply, how often have the ‘non-compliant’ students who enter our classrooms, come from a place where their attempts at engagement were brushed aside as peripheral to the lesson objectives? And when they enter our college freshman classrooms, how closed off have they become because of years of enforced rote memorization and denied curiosity, starting as far back as preschool?

My research niche is in student interest, and in my current inquiry I have been asking students in my classes over two years what makes them willingly engage in their learning experiences. I have identified certain truths. First, teaching adolescents and young adults is not like teaching young children. Young adults and teens, as a very natural part of their developmental trajectory, will shut down engagement if they come to believe their teacher (or parent) does not value them or what they value. Second, authentic engagement begins by building trust, community, and mutual respect, where students are willing, and even eager to authentically share their truths. Third, we as teachers need to take time to hear and absorb the shared truths of our students’ lived experiences, both past and present. Fourth, Students engage most deeply when they can relate to what they are being taught, and teachers should be able to convince any student why the subjects they are learning matter in their lives. Otherwise, those teachers risk losing student engagement before instruction even begins.

The best learning occurs where our students take subjective ownership of their learning experiences for their own authentic betterment. In nature, all animals are driven to learn, not to be compliant with nature, but to foster their own personal goals and sustain their well-being. Curiosity and Interest are manifestations of that drive, the primary stimuli engaged within the classroom to foster valuable learning outcomes.

That psychologist who assessed my son Will sixteen years ago knew the sad truth behind an outdated model of education which has persisted beyond its shelf life. School will most likely not reward your son. But I hope life will. What a sad observation, and one I did not fully understand back then. But now I have made it my mission to inspire curiosity in students to stimulate deep engagement. Once students are curious, they are open, and once they are open, that is when deep learning occurs, ultimately the only learning that matters.

When I embarked upon this career path in 2004 with an intensive TESOL training program at Columbia University, I was exposed to many teaching techniques, lesson plan ideas, and guiding principles of pedagogy. However, it wasn’t until I found myself before the blackboard, facing my students and drenched in sweat, that I discovered what it meant to teach. As every student soon learns, being exposed to knowledge is not the same as internalizing it, and receiving instruction is not the same thing as learning. Teaching, when done well, is the art of sparking in students the desire to learn. For me, this means cultivating a student-centered approach to learning, where the students take responsibility for their own intellectual growth, discovering their interests, talents, and passions in the process.

A student-centered approach requires that the instructor maximize opportunities for students to learn from course material, while responding creatively to classroom challenges. Students themselves often provide answers to problems that arise, but only if the instructor allows and encourages the process. Practically, this means creating student-driven classroom activities, including group work, guided peer review of student writing, group projects, and collective problem-solving on the part of the students. I first developed these techniques teaching ESL to college students from 2004 to 2019, and have refined and elaborated on them in teaching Composition, World Humanities, and Creative Writing at both City College and City Tech.

While the extent to which I am responsible for curriculum content varies class by class, I am certainly always responsible for how content is presented to the students. Specifically, I always try to assign readings with practical follow-up activities involved, or particular questions for students to consider while reading, so that reading is an active, rather than a passive activity. My approach to student questions about curriculum content is to encourage such questions in class, letting them inform the direction of class discussions and future assignments. I have often added readings to the syllabus based on student questions and feedback.

In writing instruction, I continually refresh curricula and assigned readings to expose students to the widest possible variety of writing genres and from as diverse a selection of authors as possible. I often pair readings with audiovisual and digital content to broaden and deepen discussion, and provide more points of entry for students with different learning styles and life experiences. I find this approach succeeds in sparking creativity and interest in the students, and inspires them to write in a variety of genres themselves, to discover the purpose behind writing forms and styles, and to take more risks on the page.

My students are primarily first-generation Americans from immigrant households, many of them the first in their families to attend college. Each has something valuable to offer the class, and to this end, I strive to help students make connections between their own lives and the themes and voices represented in course content. This often leads to great leaps in writing skills development, even in the course of a single semester. I have helped students find and develop their writing voices once they discover writers such as Junot Díaz, Chang-Rae Lee, and Mohsin Hamid. I have also discovered that the many of the same students who embrace the writing of James Baldwin can appreciate Jane Austen and Homer. There are many keys to opening a student’s intellectual curiosity, and there is no better way to find out just how many than to spend years teaching in culturally diverse classrooms. Overall, my grounding wire is to maintain a sense of humility, respect for student contributions, and a belief in each student’s ability to rise to a challenge.

Before students can learn to properly read and write, they need to believe that they belong in college. They have to feel that they are worthy of getting a degree. Many students come to college with unclear goals or because they feel it is expected of them. Most students are not the top of the class, just average students who have made it through high school. Any college teacher needs to boost up these young people and welcome them to the challenges of college.

Students teach me much more than I ever teach them. I tell them that. The classroom and college is a place where their life experiences matter and can be helpful to others. My life experiences can help them. The CUNY schools where I have taught are so rich in diversity. Again, before getting to the core elements of any specific class we have to celebrate and welcome all these experiences. A college class is where we can do this. Any time spent sharing experiences is never wasted.

For most of these students, their English class is just a small slice of their lives. Most have other classes, including their major, which they consider to be more important than English. Many have jobs and complex family/friend issues. I try to link their lives into their college experiences and show them that this writing course can only help them in all classes and aspects of life.

One goal I have every semester is not to lose students. You are never a success if students stop coming to class. Having students feel comfortable in a classroom makes them want to come to class . It is vital to know your students’ names and a bit about them. It is vital for the students to know their classmates. I make it a point to learn their names after the first class. Students like to know that their teacher knows them. Be lively. Be approachable.

Most students love to share. Group work is essential. Even the simple action of letting students write their ideas in markers on the whiteboard brings students into the class. Even the quietest student likes writing on the board and sharing

Each semester, I buy inexpensive little notebooks for each of my students.and give them out on the first day. I tell the students that it is not a class notebook, but their journal. Every class starts with ten minutes of journal writing, some just plain freewriting. Other days I give a prompt. I vow never to read their journal, but just ask that they write write write. This has been a great success as students know that their writing will not be marked and that there is no right or wrong way to journal. Later on in the semester, the journal can be a jump start to the concept of writing and rewriting. The key to good writing is rewriting. I am always so impressed by how everyone participates in journal writing in the class. Some start writing nightly. Making writing a daily process helps teach firsthand the importance of writing. Many learn to love it.

Tell the students that they are writers. There are lots of good ways to write. Just as we all look different we all write differently. Ask how they use writing in their every day life. In 2022 everyone texts each other. That is writing. Leaving a note for a coworker at your job at an ice cream parlor is writing. Writing directions is writing. Writing a recipe is writing. Make them aware.

Despite having a relaxed classroom atmosphere, I want students to be aware that a lot will be expected of them. I stress punctuality and attendance. (Half the success in life really is just showing up on time ready to do whatever.) Students are expected to do their assignments and keep their own records of the work they produce. I am doing them a disservice if I chase them down for every assignment. Set the bar high and most will strive for it.

Below is the teaching statement I’ve been sending out when I apply for non-adjunct teaching jobs:

As a teacher, I try to demystify the process of making meaning from difficult texts for students. I begin the semester with texts they find familiar in some way because I want students to feel comfortable even while they are being challenged. I make close reading fun and use scaffolding to make assignments manageable. These methods make texts seem relatable and give students a clear grasp of the interpretive and argumentative processes.

At Hunter College, a senior college in the City University of New York (CUNY) system, I have frequently taught “Introduction to Writing about Literature,” a general-education course that teaches freshmen how to interpret and write analytical essays about prose fiction, Shakespearean drama, and poetry. We begin the semester with outwardly familiar texts so that students feel comfortable as interpretive challenges increase. For instance, students find A Raisin in the Sun accessible because its setting in an urban apartment is recognizably real to them. Many students have read Lorraine Hansberry’s play in high school, so their prior knowledge of the play reassures them they’re on solid footing in the class. Students learn the value of thorough and close (re)reading as we examine debates and tensions within the text (Afrocentrism versus black assimilation, for example) on which the text can be convincingly read as taking opposite stances. We talk about how the play can be staged different ways to make various characters appear more or less sympathetic, and how tracing where the text’s sympathies lie is key to discerning its meaning. With this interpretive practice, students understand that, while not a hard science, literary analysis permits any reading that students can support with logical analysis of textual evidence—that is, that all claims about a text must begin with evidence. Seminar-style class discussion in a mix of small groups and the full class helps to focus students and show them that they have the skills to make meaning from dense texts both in conversation and in writing. After students write argumentative interpretive essays about more familiar texts like A Raisin in the Sun or Othello, they have gained the practice to give them the confidence, patience, and interpretive scrutiny to make sense of texts whose styles may feel more foreign to them, such as poetry.

Much as prior exposure to a text makes students feel more comfortable deeply analyzing it in ways they hadn’t thought of before, their resulting new understanding of close-reading methods makes them feel more secure and ready for challenges when we enter our poetry unit. We practice collaborative close reading by analyzing a given poem line by line in a class-wide conversation. I ask students to think about word sequence, why lines are broken in particular places, how the poem sounds when read aloud, how ambiguity might allow for multiple meanings, whether such multiple meanings can be in play simultaneously or contradict one another. Discussing these issues as a whole class enables students to bounce ideas off one another, to find textual evidence to support their views and refute opposing ones, and to learn from the reading methods of their classmates, as well as to benefit from my guiding questions and high level of enthusiasm. This convivial environment makes interpreting seemingly difficult texts a friendlier and more productive experience for students.

I further build up students’ confidence by helping them realize the close-reading practice they already have. For example, their interest and ability increase when we discuss the similarities between close-reading a poem and close-reading a text message exchange, as both involve scrutiny of line breaks, word choice, tone, and approach to punctuation. I also often have students interpret song lyrics of their choosing as a homework assignment. This assignment shows students that poetry occurs in other media and genres that they are more experienced in close-reading.

While I give students oral feedback and ask constructive questions to guide their thinking in generative directions in class, I also open lines of clear communication for students to test ideas during scaffolded research assignments. Careful preliminary scaffolding makes students feel prepared for what could otherwise seem the arduous task of composing research papers. After reading their primary source, students write précis on a secondary source and post them to an online discussion board so that they can develop a shared resource bank of articles they have read. Students can use one another’s précis as readers’ guides to critical articles, and I tell them they can use one article they originally found via the discussion board. This helps make research feel more manageable, because students are already armed with two secondary sources when they use the library’s databases to find their next sources, often their first time seeking scholarly sources online.

Next, students write an annotated bibliography with a research topic to show the common point of entry for each of their sources; they then compose a proposal along with guiding questions to formulate their thinking. Students email me their annotated bibliographies and proposals. This allows me to give them the go-ahead promptly or to ask them to better flesh out their ideas, to find more suitable sources, to home in on their topic, to favor interpretation and argument over synthesis, to include more generative guiding questions, and so on. Students feel acknowledged and can then either move on to the next stage of their research or start revising promptly. Further, when I ask students to revise by a certain deadline, they practice their organizational skills. It is now their responsibility to organize their schedules, to distribute their workloads, and to be in touch with me to request a slight extension if the new deadline is simply unreasonable for them given other commitments.

Using email for this purpose enables prompt, efficient communication with students about their ideas as they develop and helps maintain a record of the trajectory of their thinking about this project over the course of the semester. I always cater the feedback I give a student to that student’s particular work, but processing student work relatively quickly and early in their research process allows me also to shape discussion and activities in class to help students grasp any concepts that prove troublesome for multiple students. Students feel that they’re not alone in their confusion when I tell them that many of their classmates are grappling with similar issues. We can also use such in-class discussions as a workshop space wherein students can suggest possible solutions to their classmates’ concerns about obstacles they may face in researching and writing, repeating these class-wide brainstorming sessions as necessary for the duration of the assignment.

During peer review, students learn that there are other ways of approaching any assignment, be they better, worse, or just different. Exchanging drafts with their peers not only gives students extra feedback in a low-stakes setting, but also improves conviviality in the classroom due to their small-group workshopping conversations. During group work, I walk around the room to check in with students. I often start these short chats by asking them for something going well in their partner’s paper, and something their partner could improve upon, guiding them to keep their focus on their classmate’s paper rather than their own. For peer review helps students think reflectively about writing while giving them a short break from their own writing. This defamiliarization with their own writing lets students return to it with a somewhat fresher view and better identify areas in which they can improve. As always, as I walk around the room, I carefully observe students’ strengths and weaknesses in order to tailor our course so I can build on students’ preexisting reading and writing backgrounds to give them the skills they most need.