Thanks for taking a moment to check out my teaching portfolio. If you're viewing this page, that means you're probably seeking information about me and/or my composition pedagogy. Well, I'm happy to oblige!
A Little About Me
I'm a graduate student and teaching fellow in the MFA program at UMass, Boston. I'm also a fiction writer, a published journalist, a creative writing teacher, a father, a husband, and a dog-dad. Most recently, I've had the privilege of teaching 200-level creative writing to University of Massachusetts undergraduates.
Once I started teaching, I began to discover something unusual about my undergraduates. Many of them didn't understand how or why writing in college was different from the writing they did in high school. Some students leaned on personal narrative or the five-paragraph essay, as many were taught those genres were what constituted “good” writing. Many were eager to do well in their courses, but struggled to determine what their college professors wanted. Some even resigned themselves to being “bad” writers.
During my time as both an undergraduate and a graduate student, I learned that writing isn't just something that people are good or bad at. Instead, it's a discipline that can be taught much like history or mathematics. So, I wanted to find a way to fix my students' misconceptions. I wanted to help them realize that if they wanted to, they could learn to be better writers.
Most of all, I wanted to offer students the confidence to tackle college writing by unlocking some of the mysteries that surround it. I believe accomplishing those goals starts with a solid understanding of first-year composition from both a theoretical and a practical perspective.
This portfolio is a culmination of my research into the field as well as its practical application. It distills much of the current scholarship into a theory of writing, and a theory of writing pedagogy in a way that will best benefit first-year composition students. Included here are also course materials born from these theories for use in the composition classroom.
