Teaching

I have a master’s degree in Rhetoric from Washington State University, after which I developed a significant and diverse career teaching college-level writing and communication at universities in China and the USA. I love teaching students to harness the tools of language as they seek to establish themselves in academia and in the word. My areas of specialty as an educator are multilingual writing, critical pedagogy and discourse analysis. Some teaching highlights:

• I spent two years developing an Academic English curriculum at Pacific University for a new dual degree program in Optometry. The program was a collaboration between Pacific and Shandong University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Jinan, China. You can find an article about this innovative international partnership here.

• I spent a year teaching academic writing in Gansu Province, China. The university I taught at, Northwest Minzu University, was established to teach ethic minorities in Lanzhou, a city at the crossroads of Tibetan, Uyghur and Mongolian cultures.

• You can find a link to an essay I wrote about teaching here, as well as a sample power point (although without the accompanying lecture that brings it alive), my teaching statement, and my academic CV.

• My master’s thesis, “‘How Can He be Our President?’ Co-constructing Meaning and Identity with International Students after the 2016 Presidential Election,” is a discourse analysis study of how power operates in a classroom discussion between myself and my students, and how that power affects the meaning we are seeking to build together in that conversation.