I know I am a teacher. If reading, writing, and playing are my loves, then teaching is my ambition, my activism. I have taught at nearly all levels of education—from elementary to college—but I prefer and offer my commitment to teaching, learning, creativity, collaboration, and student advocacy at the university level. I regularly work with first year students, graduate students, first generation students, student veterans, student athletes, students with disabilities, and most crucially, queer and trans students and students of color. I believe teaching is a concert of inspiration, invention, interdisciplinarity, leadership, mentorship, alchemy, empathy, and stand-up comedy.
I have taught for just about a third of a century. Eight years of composition and first year preparatory courses at the University of Maryland (UMD), nine years of writing, literature, and special topics classes at the University of Washington (UW), two years of American literature, media studies, and digital humanities courses at Drew University, two years of queer studies, popular culture, and feminist literature at the University of Oregon (UO), and now more of the same at Ohio University (OU)—that’s over 100 sections, over 2,500 students, and over 10,000 papers graded. And I still want to go on. My courses invite and integrate discussions about academics, current events, lived experience, technology, and everyday culture. All of my course descriptions include: “A requirement for this class is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume.” Curiosity is a much-needed antidote to things like fear and misunderstanding, especially in this day and age. Curiosity leads to listening, to empathy, and hopefully, to a greater awareness of the wide world—beauty, bruises, and all. Overall, I encourage students to think, speak, write about and participate in diversity, in difference, and in community. As I half-jokingly tell students on the first day of term, teaching is about infecting their minds, their lives to encourage them to ask questions, to explore, and to extend themselves beyond their comfort zones. In ways big and small, I impress the idea that teaching is empowerment, activism, entertainment, and world-making, and that learning is centrally about reading, thinking, writing, making, sharing, and doing.
I also know that teaching comes in many forms and guises. In the past, I served an academic advisor for UMD’s Division of Letters & Sciences and helped the campus LGBTQ communities organize events, create publications, and facilitate speakers bureaus and a peer-support group. At UW, I pursued similar coalitional teaching and learning opportunities. I was an officer of the English Graduate Student Organization and an organizing member of the Critical Gaming Project and the Keywords for Video Game Studies graduate interest group. I was also been an officer for the QGrads LGBT group and served as trainer for the Q Center’s Safe Zone project. At Drew, I was the faculty advisor for the undergraduate gaming club and the Drew Acorn student newspaper. At UO, I was a core faculty member for the Queer Studies minor and the faculty advisor to the LGBTQIA+ Scholars Academic Residence Community (ARC). Now, at Ohio, I am an academic advisor to English majors and minors, a mentor for the Honors Tutorial College, an affiliate faculty member of Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies and the Rhetoric and Composition Program; I am also the faculty advisor to the Asian American Pacific Islander Student Union and the English Graduate Student Organization. I count myself as one of the out and proud and vocal citizens on campus. I have learned to wear many hats: scholar, teacher, guide, organizer, advocate. These things should not be anathema to the classroom, to teaching, and to living. In a day and age when Colombine, September 11, Ferguson, COVID-19, and January 6 are a startling reality, there can be no failure in education and in the examination of the world around us. I believe that teaching is and should be direct action.
Teaching is also about unions, about coalitions, about intersections, empathy, and communication. It is about being a cheerleader, a short-order cook, a judge, and a good neighbor. Teaching is also about honesty, humor, reciprocity, respect, and trust and self-confidence on both sides of the desk or lectern. The best teachers in my life have always modeled the ideas, values, philosophies, excitement, and investment they possessed themselves and in their work with no expectation that I would follow exactly, blindly in their wake. They taught me instead ways to grow, ways to change, and ways to follow my heart, my questions. They taught me a teacher is only as successful as their student and vice-versa. And they taught me to teach others. Now and ad infinitum, here and wherever I go, I wish to do the very same.
For more information about my teaching, see also the following: