Statement of Teaching Philosophy

I believe literary study means attending to forms of expression that bring to light the often elusive socioeconomic, political, and aesthetic structures that shape our material realities. I therefore teach students to read in ways that that bare and critique these structures and to imagine new possibilities for living within them. In this way, literary study enables us to identify the narratives already informing our actions and beliefs and to thereby articulate new narratives. I teach this approach to reading as fundamentally co-creative in two respects—first, as an act of sharing in authorship with the text: students practice making meaning with the text rather than merely recovering meaning. Second, literary interpretation is social: by calling attention to the elements that form (or deform) a text, I aim to have my students expand what they find to be legible—that is, what they’re able to hear and to say.

When I teach literature, I begin by asking my students to think critically about how they experience and recognize narrative; and when they encounter unfamiliar forms, how they can rearticulate their understanding of the properties and functions of narrative form. Learning to receive stories as such allows students to become more effective storytellers and, by extension, more effective actors in the world. Toward this end, I include texts in my course syllabi that challenge students’ generic expectations—texts, for example, that lack a familiar plot structure or introduce experimental literary elements—so students can cultivate their discernment of when a story is being told and how stories take shape. In my Literature from the Margins course, students read contemporary American fiction such as Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street and Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, as well as nonfiction such as Deborah Miranda’s Bad Indians. Many students in this course, despite their diverse backgrounds, find the fragmented and nonlinear forms difficult. In response, I have asked my students to identify and briefly describe three moments in a novel that struck them, for whatever reason, and to work collaboratively to group their notes on the classroom wall. They then name connections between each group of notes to visualize the novel’s shape. Following this exercise, I lead a class discussion in which they consider how and why they identify meaningful events and, more importantly, how their discomfort at the disruption of their usual process of identification might itself be constructive, allowing them to up-anchor their cultural expectations of the shape that stories take. I therefore consider my approach, here, a pedagogy of disorientation, or as advancing disorientation as a critical practice. Reflecting on Erdrich, my students have discovered that the novel’s shifting narrative viewpoints and confusing temporality help them to see a connection between their narrative expectations and how they conceive of identity. Erdrich, some students have construed, stages the negotiation of intersectional identity as relational rather than individualistic or teleological. Others have grappled with their inclination to make the fragmented narrative whole, to essentially settle the story by imposing order rather than allowing the story form to unsettle their interpretive frameworks and desire for mastery. More broadly, these lessons have offered the opportunity for the class to think about how literary form can reproduce or resist the settler colonial stance and how amplifying marginalized experiences and perspectives is a matter of form as well as content. 

Stories that challenge generic expectations can, then, surely remediate expectations surrounding identity categories. My pedagogy therefore seeks to challenge standards of legibility historically determined along gender, racial, and class lines, inviting students to draw on their personal knowledge and experiences to interrogate social classifications. In an English major capstone course, I introduced my students to Leslie Fiedler’s “Amateur Criticism,” an essay that calls on critics to write in the same spirit as the literary rather than in the objective voice of the sciences. Alongside Fiedler’s admittedly traditional essay, I taught scholarship, such as Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, that has revised the model of amateur criticism, which lays bare the prohibitive criteria of legitimacy, to bring the ideas of women and people of color to the forefront. These readings set the foundation for the second half of the course, which surveyed autotheory. Texts like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts serve as models for the possibilities of criticism to bridge experiential knowledge and intellectual engagement, possibilities that English majors explored in their capstone projects. One student wrote on colorism in Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use,” interrupting her analysis with footnoted autotheoretical reflections on her identity as a light-skinned black woman to disclose how the novel shaped her insight into her own relative privilege. Another student, writing about Turkish censorship of stories of the Armenian genocide, punctuated her scholarly research with audio recorded oral histories from family members who had survived it, illustrating the need for scholarship on buried histories to create its own archive. When teaching academic research and writing, I bid my students to consider their scholarship as also a form of play—even where the stakes are high—that enlists them in intellectual community, one in which they can begin collectively remaking the structures they inherit.

In my classroom, student enlistment in intellectual community is not merely theoretical; students often actively partner with members of the communities surrounding campus. As a public humanist and community-engaged teacher, I ask my students to approach the intertwined practices of reading and writing as a collaborative process in which they blur the boundary between pedagogical space and public life. Students in my course Imagining American Health: Cultural Texts in Policy Contexts are partnering with Whistle Stop Tours, a performance-based project that works to shape the public history of Durham’s Black neighborhoods. Our partnership will lead to the development of two interactive, digital health equity tours, using ArcGIS Online and Stqry, of the Hayti neighborhood. Hayti historically sustained thriving black-owned business and cultural institutions, but the construction of the Durham freeway in the era of urban renewal displaced and isolated the community. Toward crafting a tour that will incorporate community members’ knowledge and experiences, students facilitated, with the guidance of Whistle Stop Tours staff, a story circle in which community participants shared their health stories. Students, in discussion with community storytellers, then elaborated on several place-based “core” narratives in the qualitative data—narratives that can be integrated into a tour that will lend insight into both community challenges and community assets and resilience. Students also practiced thematic coding and visual mapping to identify overlaps, gaps, and contradictions across the body of community members’ stories. I expect that students, many of whom plan to study health or practice medicine, will learn from this process that research is about supporting multiple sources of knowledge, including knowledge rooted in local expertise and lived experiences. Furthermore, the course asks students to practice non-extractive forms of listening to amplify alternative narratives on health equity and to reflect on storytelling as a way to cultivate radical empathy—the effort to understand, feel with, and advocate for others without erasing difference or seeking comfort. By embedding, in each tour, audiovisual recordings of oral history performances by Whistle Stop Tours’ staff, students will shed light not only on the geography of racism’s political economy, but also on the human beings that plot a course through it, yet whose bodies are often rendered invisible by structural critique. In this way, I ask students to draw on the tools of narrative analysis and the interdisciplinary humanities more broadly to expand the boundaries of their community and develop the skills they need to contribute to fostering a more just, democratic society.       

The above assignments and activities are examples of the creative and collaborative learning environment I work to foster as a teacher. Through such creative collaboration, I aim to bring the ethical stakes of literary studies to the foreground by asking students both to engage with what is not immediately intelligible to them and to push past safe readings by instead taking informed and thoughtful risks in how they read, write, and think. In doing so, students come to appreciate literary critique not merely as an intellectual exercise but as a practice that demands courage and creativity in questioning unjust power relations, refusing domination, and envisioning non-violent social alternatives.