Statement of Teaching Philosophy

Note from Annie: My teaching statement is a living document, a perpetual work in progress. Please enjoy my newest statement, updated 02/17/2024.

College classrooms are sites of revision. Each day, my students and I transform our small communities into sites of deliberate intellectual and personal growth, putting into practice Vincent Van Gogh’s belief that “great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”

I encourage revision at every level from all of my students: revision of writing, revision of assumptions, and revision of values. My students’ high-level thinking demands that I revise my teaching practices daily toward increasingly ethical and inclusive ends. A student commented in an anonymous evaluation of “The Rhetoric of Intersectional Feminism,” my general education Rhetoric course, that they enjoyed “the open debates that we had in class, it gave me a better understanding of the material and how to apply it in real time to different issues that we were learning in class.” This student revised their approach to higher ed learning in order to appreciate not just content, and not just perspectives, but application of diverse ideas to broader cultural and community frameworks. My courses regularly prompt students to revise their assumptions about“student experience” in order to become deliberate and thoughtful readers, writers, and citizens.

We explore social justice and community building. From day one, our in-class activities concretize the importance of making connections between textual observations and life as we truly live it, which underscores the exigency of using literature as a means of examining ourselves others. I firmly believe that my students are my best lesson planners and have a keen sense for the most significant challenges facing culture at large. In a discussion of Nella Larsen’s Passing in my General Education Literature course, we discussed the complex issue of racial passing. After hearing her classmates use the word “heritage” numerous times, a student raised her hand and asked, “But what IS heritage, especially in a melting pot like America?” I paused, at first feeling self-conscious about my lack of a pithy answer for what seemed like a simple concept. However, the ensuing conversation—that day, week, and semester—was one of the most valuable and humbling moments of my career, and my literature classes now begin with this very discussion.

We cultivate analytical savvy. I guide students through two weeks of multimodal media activities that engage with marginalized voices. In my General Education Rhetoric course, I assign Beyoncé’s Lemonade as a complement to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen to explore the rhetoric of black women’s anger. As this is a sensitive, and at times precarious, conversation, we begin with a dispassionate close reading of the texts to answer deceptively far-reaching questions: What is she arguing? What lays foundations for her anger? Why does her anger linger with us? Or why doesn’t it? We raise the stakes by using our close reading findings to hold class debates on each text, with half of the class in the position of the artist and the other as her antagonist. Arguing on behalf of these figures helps my students examine and revise their reactions to racialized emotion, as well as to their capabilities as rhetors.

We laugh, and we remember that we are human. We close the above unit of my Rhetoric course with a look at how cultural stakes change when masculine expression interrupts black women’s anger. Exploring the power of parody as a rhetorical tool in Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s parody of Beyoncé’s “Hold Up” not only urges my students to consider issues of race, sexual identity, and gender expression in the context of humor, but it provides much-needed levity and comfort at the end of an emotionally-charged first-year course. I remind my students that each of us is what Claudia Rankine calls a Citizen, and we effect change through small actions, such as pausing, revising our perspectives, and laughing with each other.