PEDAGOGICAL VALUES
“Be the person you needed when you were younger.” – Ayesha Siddiqi
“If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.” – Toni Morrison
Attending SUNY Buffalo, a large, diverse state school, set the groundwork for my professional ethics. My teachers advocated for affordable, accessible public college education. As a teacher, that means not only accepting, but actively supporting students regardless of their background, race, gender, sexuality, ability, culture, and class. I constantly hone my understanding of where students are coming from by talking to them, having them write about their experiences, asking for their pronouns, and establishing a classroom community through communication and sensitivity. Learning is a vulnerable practice. To improve, one has to be able to take criticism and feedback, which can feel very scary if one does not feel “seen” as a capable individual. Setting up a student for success in the classroom requires understanding them and creating the most supportive environment for them as an individual.
First-Generation Students
My mother was the first person in my extended family to complete college. It wasn’t until I began teaching first-generation college students at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the University of Cincinnati at Clermont that I realized that I was only a second-generation college student. When I started college, there were a lot of things that I didn’t know about the infrastructure of academia that I might have known if going to college was normal in my family. Growing up in this environment and then seeing first-generation college students in my classrooms made me realize that I could help bridge the gaps for them by being incredibly clear in my expectations and grading, helping orient them and advise them, and being kind and patient while they learned how to navigate academia while learning the content of my particular course. My teaching practices have morphed to accommodate and train first-generation students.
Designing for Disability
When I first went into a Ph.D. program in 2005, I was a Presidential Fellow at the University of Virginia’s highly-ranked English program. Although I felt intellectually prepared for the Ph.D., I was not psychologically prepared. Events from my early 20s led to a debilitating post-traumatic stress disorder, perhaps because I was finally safe enough to process them. I did not think of my PTSD as a “disability,” and although I sought both psychological and psychiatric counseling at Virginia, there were not the same disability support services then as there are today, especially not for graduate students. After two years of struggling to concentrate on my schoolwork while battered by invasive PTSD symptoms, I had to drop out of the program.
My PTSD and failure to complete my Ph.D. haunted me for years until I began teaching at Indian Springs School, a private boarding high school in Alabama (2011-17), where I was able to alchemize my pain by helping others. Besides being the Librarian, I taught English, and my students kept journals – a common high school teaching practice. In their journals, I read horrific tales of childhood trauma. Even these seemingly privileged kids were coming to class with serious adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). Because I had done my own psychological work and reading on trauma, I felt that I was specially positioned to help students learn despite the haze of trauma. Then, and later during my Master’s in Education program, I focused on trauma-informed practices to try to help students do their best academic work in less stressful ways. I learned that trauma-informed practices are also useful for students with anxiety, depression, autism, and attention deficit disorders. One element of trauma-informed teaching is to break down assignments into very small, digestible chunks and steps so that they are not overwhelming. After watching Elise Roy’s TedTalk “When We Design for Disability, We All Benefit,” I have started designing my courses “for disability” so that even students who do not have an official diagnosis or support from disability services can benefit from accommodations. Learning about trauma-informed teaching due to my own traumatic experiences became useful in the everyday classroom, even more so during the COVID pandemic, when almost all students, regardless of ability, suffered from stress, grief, and burnout.
Race, Class, and Intersectional Feminism
While working at the private boarding school, I started volunteering in the Woodlawn Writers Corps at Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), which brings poets to Birmingham K-12 schools to teach poetry. In U.S. News and World Report’s words, “The district’s minority enrollment is 100%… 69.7% of students are economically disadvantaged.” There, I realized that I had a lot more to give to the local community. I wasn’t yet certified to teach in K-12, so I taught at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, which serves diverse racial, cultural, gender, and class backgrounds. As a writing teacher, I became more focused on content, argument, and encouraging students to find their own voices than on enforcing Standard English. While teaching introductory and remedial English Composition courses, I also worked at the University Writing Center, where the clientele was even more diverse because it ranged from freshmen to graduate students across all disciplines and from all over the world. Tutoring helped me learn to target precise issues to improve students’ individual writing and revision skills. Tutoring and teaching informed each other to make my tutoring more pedagogical and my teaching more personal.
After working in the English Department at UAB for three years, I transferred to the Gender Studies Department, where I have now been teaching Women’s and Gender Studies (WS 100) since 2021, increasing enrollment each semester. Heavily influenced by bell hooks, I take an intersectional feminist approach with this course, teaching about the multiplicity of gender and sexuality as well as how race, class, culture, and religion intersect with the concerns of gender equality. Even male students enjoy the class, as they begin to see how stereotypes about gender affect their quality of life, too. Student-athletes, healthcare workers, and students with military obligations or family obligations tend to take the course because it’s online/asynchronous, and we also talk about how gender intersects with sports, health, the military, and family expectations. Rather than structuring the class as a “history of feminism” course, I structure it as a current events class where we read and respond to the gender politics of what is happening right now. Although I have always tried to diversify my syllabi, teaching this class has made me even more aware of what texts I assign, what topics are discussed, and who is speaking. I enjoy teaching this course to see the range of ideas that students bring to the table and to watch the respectful but deep discussions they have. There aren’t many spaces where it’s safe to have conversations without feeling like you have to say “the right thing” or feeling shut down by the majority voice. This class provides a safe space for students to work through concepts and situations that impact their lives every day.
Ongoing Service
I assist with the Books for the Black Belt initiative run by the University of Alabama’s School of Library and Information Studies by curating and sorting donated books for 4K-12 schools in some of the most impoverished counties in the nation. I work part-time as a tutor for the Connell School of Writing, which, like the aforementioned DISCO, teaches writing in Birmingham City Schools.