Community Member

Writing Center Director / Writing Instructor

Sep 20, 2021 8:42:51 AM

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I am a composition scholar, an educational developer, a practitioner of transformative education both in and out of the classroom, and an accidental instructional design evangelist. Currently, I am a Writing Center Director at a small private college, where I am putting my educational development and instructional design experience into practice both in and out of the classroom. As Executive Director of the De La Salle Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning, I created a teaching and learning center from the ground up, which gave me valuable insight into faculty pedagogical needs university-wide. As an educational developer at a small university, I was responsible for supporting faculty in every discipline and at every instructional level. Drawing on my years of experience running programs for “at-risk,” first-generation students, I was also well-positioned to support faculty on inclusive educational practices and on transformative educational opportunities for all students. For nearly 20 years, I have designed and taught social-justice-infused courses on academic discourse. I have a Ph.D. in English from Temple University, with a concentration in Composition and Rhetoric, one of the only disciplines outside of Education to provide explicit training in pedagogy and assessment. I see myself as a translator of sorts with a gift for explaining how our unconscious and unquestioned pedagogical practices intersect with modern educational theory; how to begin (or continue) the lifelong work of transformative praxis; and how to mediate our pedagogical practices via educational technology. I’m also mom to two kids with an unusual educational history, now enrolled in a global-majority public school in Philadelphia. My praxis is also shaped by the structural inequities baked into American public education, something that I have taught about for many years. Though my primary expertise is in higher education pedagogy, I have come to realize that the same practices and ways of thinking that I shared with my university colleagues apply to PreK-12 education as well. Good teaching is good teaching, and the insights I highlight through my work apply to a wide range of educational levels and institutions.