I am a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Rhetoric and Composition. My scholarly interests include reflective pedagogies, teaching with technologies, and qualitative research methods.

My dissertation, Practices of Value: A Materialist View of Going Public with Student Writing, is a direct outgrowth of my experiences working with students in the composition classroom and reflecting on my pedagogical practices. In this project, I explore the intersections among new possibilities for distribution presented by emerging technologies, composition’s public turn, and the networks of value that exist for student writing. In an exciting moment of great possibility presented by new media, I examine the potential of digital distribution by drawing on teacher-research to question the move to make students’ writing public by studying how students relate to and value their work. To understand the ways in which value is ascribed to student texts, I apply a Marxist frame to the labor of student writers and consider the ways students comment on and understand the work they do as writers. I argue that instead of assuming that wider distribution of student writing equals greater valuation of such texts, students’ writing will attain more institutional value as we move it toward the public only when such a move involves students themselves questioning what it means to go public in particular venues. While students in my study appreciated being published, heightening their awareness of their publication choices and inviting them to actively make such decisions themselves made them “feel like writers” as they claimed more ownership over their writing. In this project, I stress the importance of students’ participation in the move to go public, and assert that a revaluation of their writing relies on their critical meta-understandings of publication.

My research involves an investigation of both theoretical and pedagogical moves and my hope is that this undertaking will allow me to continue the work of composition scholars, such as Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, and Amy Lee, who question the contexts and practices that shape the teaching of writing and the ways in which they position our students as writers and the work they complete in our courses. After developing my dissertation into a book manuscript, I want to take the materialist lens and qualitative approach I have developed in this dissertation and apply them to other pedagogical moves. I am invested in examining other contemporary practices, such as the call for multi-modal composing, to see how they position the work of our students as well as their writing in light of textual economies. Because my current research is rooted in a consideration of both composition’s public turn and the role of digital means of distribution, an extension of this work, where I can continue to investigate the ways in which technologies inform the composition classroom and position student writers, seems like a natural outgrowth.

Graduate Courses taken at the University of Massachusetts Boston

EN 475 Seminar for Tutors
EN 610 Teaching of Composition
EN 619 Writing for the Public
EN 697B Teachers Researching Literacy
EN 697C Perspectives on Composition
AP 622* Cross-Cultural Perspectives

*Taken in the Applied Linguistics Department

Graduate Courses taken at the University of Massachusetts Amherst

EN 698I Teaching Basic Writing (practicum)
EN 698K Language and Diversity (practicum)

EN 891I Writing and Emerging Technologies
EN 891LL Composition Theory
EN 891T Race and Writing
EN 891TT Introduction to Rhetorical Theory
EN 891Z Introduction to Research on Writing
EN 891ZZ Genre, Context, and Social Action

My scholarship, located in questions of digital literacies, is a move to bring theory to the classroom as much as it is a move to bring the classroom to theory. In an attempt to better understand my pedagogical approaches, my students’ experiences, and the ideological forces that shape academic settings, I use a teacher-research approach to investigate my students’ work and perspectives. For example, in my dissertation, Practices of Value: A Materialist View of Going Public with Student Writing, I examine the relationships among student texts, valuation, and distribution through the lens of circulation—an understanding of the interconnected nature of production, distribution, exchange, and consumption grounded in Marxist thought. While this project is rooted in my interests in new possibilities presented by digital distribution and composition’s interest in the public turn, it is also intended to help me better understand my own pedagogical approaches by considering my students’ reactions to “going public.” That is, I researched my pedagogy to question what a move to the public means for writing students to better understand the ways in which such an approach positions student writing.

Because my research involves an investigation of both theoretical and pedagogical moves, my hope is that it will continue the work of composition scholars, such as Bruce Horner, John Trimbur, and Amy Lee, who work to see the classroom as part of the social real—as a setting worth examining. Like these compositionists, I am invested in questioning the ways in which students are positioned and to work to invite them to act as empowered writers who claim agency over their texts. This focus on students’ actual writing practices and experiences can temper our theories in order to construct more effective pedagogies. The central goal of my research agenda dictates my research methodologies. In my dissertation, my commitment to creating a dialectic between theoretical inquiry and pedagogical practice led me to naturalistic inquiry and a constructivist approach. These qualitative methodologies allowed me to further my understandings of both my theoretical hypotheses and classroom practices and I imagine I will continue to draw on them in future projects.

I am particularly interested in applying the materialist lens I develop in my dissertation to other digital writing spaces. As a result, after turning my dissertation into a book manuscript, I plan to continue investigating the ways in which students’ texts function in textual economies in light of pedagogical practices grounded in new media and digital literacies. By questioning such practices in light of context, practice, and labor, I hope to unearth assumptions about how such approaches actually work in the classroom by considering students’ perspectives. As a researcher, I am interested in questioning the implications of multimodality for my next project. How does drawing on image, aurality, and movement shape the work students do in composition classes? How does composing such texts seem to position students in light of the contexts in which they work?
I hope to use my research not only to better understand the effects of classroom practices, but to question how such practices shape the ways in which students approach their work and how such work itself is valued by institutions, by teachers, and, most importantly, by students. In addition, I am also interested in questioning how technology shapes qualitative research. While studying my own classroom for my dissertation, I questioned the ethics of teacher-research throughout the process. I plan to bring this attention to ethics together with a consideration of digital research methodologies to address the need to come up with new approaches to classroom research that account for digital spaces. Questioning pedagogical approaches that draw on digital literacies while considering the ethics of electronic research methodologies would allow me to continue to use my research to better understand my students’ experiences with and understandings of teaching steeped in technology.

While teaching at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the Benjamin Franklin Institute of Technology (also in Boston), I worked with many students who were first generation college students and came from ethnically diverse backgrounds. These students, with their dedication to learning and willingness to engage new literacy practices, taught me that teaching is about creating opportunities for students to question and contextualize their own experiences. When I began my doctoral studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and moved to a rural setting, I thought my days of teaching for transformation were over. Instead, as I worked with the students at UMass Amherst, I realized my teaching should always intend to be transformative and that all students should work to question the intersections of literacy, knowledge, and power. My research interest in technologies’ role in the classroom is rooted in such notions, and, as a result, I question digital literacies with my students as we work together to contextualize their materiality and implications.

As a result, the approaches I take in the classroom are grounded in the assumption that learning is a social activity that is shaped by ideological and contextual factors. As a teacher, my goal is to engage my students, to invite them to rethink their understandings, and to encourage them to become aware of the significance of context and the ways in which it shapes our experiences. To accomplish this, I design curricula that position students as active and invite them to make meaning as they question the ways in which understandings and ideologies intersect. By fostering such a setting, I work to provide students with many opportunities to reflect critically on their learning and literacy practices. My hope is that such an approach allows students to come to rich meta-understandings of their own experiences and to use those understandings as they question the world around them.

I also work for my students to see their writing as “Writing”—as worthy of close and critical readings, both by their classmates and by me. While my research interests are rooted in considerations of “going public,” I am deeply committed to positioning the classroom as a public space in which students write for public reasons. Thus, during some of my strongest moments as a teacher, I have sat quietly as students engaged their classmates’ texts in serious and systematic ways as I read along with them, struck by their willingness to grapple with these texts collaboratively. I strive to design courses and class activities that invite students to see the classroom as a social real in which they write for authentic purposes. I do this by creating many opportunities for students to publish their work throughout the semester, as they share their texts with their classmates, create print publications, or remediate their essays for digital spaces. Even when student collections do not move beyond the classroom, going public with student writing within this setting emphasizes the possibilities presented by student texts.

While my classroom could be described as a setting characterized by active engagement, I try to learn from and reflect on every classroom moment. While collecting data for my dissertation, a teacher-research project, I experienced a moment when my students were frustrated by the technologies we were drawing on and were eager to move onto the next segment of the course. At the time, I thought this moment represented a weakness in both my teaching and research; however, I now see it as fruitful and generative because it led me to realizations about students’ responses to the nature of print and digital texts. When confronted with such moments, I do not only question how to do things differently next time around, but work to tease out the implications of resistance. I realize much can be learned from the more uncomfortable and seemingly unsuccessful moments of teaching. In this way, my research interests in reflective teaching practices and curriculum design inform the ways in which I position myself as a teacher. I aim not only to create courses and classroom moments that invite critical student engagement, but I also work to be reflective in order to move beyond my own assumptions and come to richer understandings of what happens in particular classroom moments and settings.