It is my goal to guide students to confidently engage with and respond to the world as it applies to them through writing. Too often, students enter the classroom holding tightly to the belief that they are bad writers. They come into the composition classroom afraid of writing – afraid to do it, share it, and even sometimes ask questions about it. It is my goal and purpose as an educator to guide students to overcome these hurdles they have set for themselves, to encourage students to find their personal writing styles through which they can navigate confidently, and to provide them with the tools and skills they need to do so.

​

In order to become successful writers, students need to have the freedom to take risks and make mistakes. My vision is to provide a space where students feel free to do. Reflecting on how this plays out in the classroom, one student, whom I’ll call Sarah, comes to mind. She began class sure that she was a terrible writer. She was so focused on her inability to punctuate sentences correctly that she couldn’t see the value in her own ideas. Her issues with grammar, as if she had been told were the most important things about writing, overshadowed the possibility that she had anything of value to share. Through a workshop-centered approach, we worked together to help her overcome her insecurities about writing and articulating her ideas. She brought her writings-in-progress to class each session, along with questions and ideas about how to move forward to make them publishable works. I believe that she discovered she had quite a bit to share and learned how to use the tools she already had to articulate her ideas. Like Sarah, I hope that more students with whom I work during any given semester will encounter similar experiences with their writing, too.

 

I believe that in order for writing to be a meaningful and worthwhile experience for students, assignments and activities need to be engaging and made relevant to students’ everyday lives. Each writing assignment is purposefully designed to encourage students to consider their values, perspectives, and identity.  Major writing assignments include a descriptive piece through which students describe a place of importance, a personal narrative that tells a story about an important lesson the students learned in their past, and an argument paper through which students choose, articulate, and defend their perspectives about an issue of interest or value to them. Each assignment is intended to encourage students to consider, in some way, aspects of their identity and how those identities engage with and contribute to society.

 

I believe that reflection is a valuable step in the learning process, and that through reflection, students are granted the opportunity to consider the choices they made in their writing. At the conclusion of each major assignment, students will be guided through an informal, low-stakes writing activity through which they respond the questions about the choices they made while composing their essays. This reflection will allow them to better understand their style, voice, and tendencies, and ultimately grow as writers and students.

 

My goals as an educator are to create meaningful and purposeful assignments, ensure my students develop confidence in their writing abilities, and to create a space where students are comfortable to discover how to articulate ideas with intention.