Teaching
As a teacher, my main task is to get my students to see
themselves as writers. To do this, they need to see writing itself
as something more than what they do to get on with other things. I
try to convey the seriousness of the discipline, while either
eliciting or cultivating the pleasure that is writing. In the
classroom, one way of achieving this goal in first-year writing is
to get students to recognize what they find interesting or
challenging both in their own lives and in the world around them
and to then convey that to others in a way that resonates. Whether
in the varied subject matter and creative flair of creative
nonfiction, which asks students to go beyond academic discourse, or
in the challenges of engaging various social problems, which
require students to go beyond academic walls, I see writing as
inexorably located at the crossroads between the self and the
world.