As a first-generation college student, I have felt the impact of learning and teaching creative writing in my life. Literature and creative writing are tools of community building, solidarity, and resistance. Through the learning of creative skills, I have found a community that is not afraid to push each other to learn and grow, I have built a platform on which to share my story, and I have discovered my own voice with which to tell my stories. When teaching English subjects such as composition and creative writing, I encourage students to create their own voice, and to use that voice for change. I strive to create a community where students can build upon previously established knowledge, and to create a learning experience that I would have appreciated when first stepping into higher education.

My goal is to help students trust themselves and their learning, to be secure in the knowledge that they are welcome in higher education. Whether that is being a welcoming hand to new and unsure students, to give critique where needed, or simply create an environment for students to challenge previously held notions, it is my goal to help each student on a personal, case-by-case basis.

Learning is both collaborative and independent. Students absorb material through readings or investigations independently, engage in conversations and seminars with peers and instructors, and take their furthered or challenged knowledge back to apply to assignments or other course work. As a student, I am required to actively engage in the content both in and out of the classroom, and this is an expectation that I pass on to my students.

In my two years of teaching English 101 at Central Washington University, I have used multiple progressive pedagogies such as portfolio pedagogy, multimodal pedagogy, and reflective pedagogy in my classroom. My ENG 101 curriculum is built into four units, each finalized into a major assignment: rhetorical analysis, writing process, writing across disciplines, and metacognition. Each unit is built on scaffolding assignments that build up to the major assignment. In class, students work collaboratively to analyze course readings, apply their learning to the course outcomes, and give feedback to their peers’ drafts.

All of my assignments have the option to be multimodal. That could be a presentation, a recording, an essay, a project, or any combination of the above. The multimodal approach to composition allows students to learn about writing in a way that they are most comfortable with. In class, students have a multimodal presentation generally once a week. Students create collaborative presentations to teach other students what they have learned from the course readings. This gives them an opportunity to flex both scholarly and creative muscles, and to learn from each other instead of from me.

The collaborative aspect of my classroom is woven into all of the scaffolding assignments. When teaching online, students interact with two of their peers in a discussion board post, answering the critical questions that have been presented. When in-person, students bring prior knowledge and analysis of the readings into class for group discussions, presentations, and multimodal writing to learn projects.

The culminating assignment of the course is an ePortfolio. This gives students the opportunity to showcase their best work, presenting it to me in an aesthetic way that represents them as a student. The ePortfolio is made up of all major assignments plus one major revision, all drafts, a reflection, and multiple choice works the student has chosen to use as evidence in their claim of fulfilling the course objectives. The reflection builds upon the four previous reflections they’ve completed in class and encourages them to use metacognitive questioning to analyze what they have learned from the course.

The evidence of student learning comes from their own acknowledgement of what they’ve learned. After every major assignment, and during the halfway point of the quarter, I request that students turn in a structured reflection of what they have learned over the past several weeks. Students reflect on the course outcomes and the scaffolding assignments they have turned in and tell me whether or not they think they learned anything. Even if it’s something small, like the definition of a rhetorical situation, having the student acknowledge that they learned something is the best evidence of student learning.

In my classroom, I make an effort to build a friendly and welcoming learning environment. Many students come to English courses with bad experiences in past language arts classrooms or speaking English as a second or third language. By decentralizing my classroom and letting the students lead the sharing of information, I take myself out of a place of authority and give the communal power back to the students. In order to do this, if there is information that students would need to learn from a reading or a lecture, I assign different groups of students to teach the class different things. For example, when teaching the components of a rhetorical situation found in Laura Bolin Carroll’s Backpacks vs. Briefcases, I break the classroom into five groups. Each group gets one components of the rhetorical situation to research, and they present their findings to the class. Students then use these definitions in their writing to learn assignment, where they define the terms in their own words and give a real-world example of a rhetorical situation.

In order to further develop an inclusive learning environment, I am most interested in the pedagogy of play. I want to build fun and community into my classroom, both to encourage retention and to create a safe learning environment. By incorporating things like games, dance, art, and design, students will be able to further develop their understanding of English fields, like composition, literature, and creative writing.