Informal Teaching Experience

My only informal teaching experience was working as a tutor for Wiregrass Georgia Technical College in Valdosta, Georgia. I began working in Wiregrass’ small tutoring center during the summer after graduating with my Bachelor’s degree. Though I initially saw this job as something to do over the summer while applying for more serious, full-time work, I eventually found myself staying on at the tutoring center for a full year. During my time as a tutor, I was asked to help students with everything from basic grammar courses to more advanced literary analysis essays, and I eventually found myself loving every single appointment and every single opportunity to help students learn and understand how to improve their writing, approach analyzing a certain work of literature, or remember core concepts of composition and grammar. By the end of my first semester working as a tutor, I realized that I wanted to try and pursue a career in teaching. As a result, I applied for the Master of Arts in English program at Valdosta State University and continued working as a tutor for Wiregrass until I began my stint as a Teaching Assistance for VSU.

Formal Teaching Experiences

By my second year of graduate studies at VSU, I was offered the opportunity to work as a Teaching Assistant for the English department. At VSU, this meant I would be tasked with teaching a section of Composition I in the Fall and Composition II in the Spring. While I was initially hesitant because the workload of graduate studies was so different than anything I had previously experienced, I eventually accepted the position because it would offer me the opportunity to see if I really did want to continue pursuing teaching as a career. Though not disastrous, this first year of teaching was incredibly rough. I think that part of this rough experience came from the fact that I was able to CLEP out of Composition I and II as an undergraduate due to my AP scores, so I had no prior experience as to what a Composition class should look like or operate as. In addition, I focused on literature studies as both an undergraduate and graduate, so I was not highly versed in the information that needed to be taught in a Composition course. In a lot of ways, I felt “thrown to the wolves” during the very first semester of my formal teaching experience--and how I made it out, I am still not sure.

To expand a bit on the idea that my very first teaching experience was rough, to say the least, I will admit that I tried to teach Composition I through graphic novels and comic books. This was probably a mistake for my very first class because the lens through which my class approached composition meant that I had to take the standardized university curriculum given to TAs and adopt it to work with a multi-modal format. Although the literacy narrative I taught for this class went well because the use of comics and graphic novels provided a very relevant source to discuss plot structure and narratives, the rest of the course was where I found trouble with the approach. Specifically, I was unsure of how to adopt the comics and graphic novels for an analysis and argumentative essay. While I did eventually settle on having students analyze a page of a graphic novel for the analysis essay and then having them make an argument about an issue on campus, but written as a comic strip, for the argumentative essay, it seemed difficult to scaffold each class towards that final project.

Then, during Composition II, I made the mistake of jamming in three books I liked as the readings for the course and trying to structure a research-based writing course around reading those works of literature. The reason behind this choice was that I was getting to the point where I just really wanted to teach literature, so I sacrificed my Composition II course for my own selfish wants. The first half of the semester was a disastrous balancing act between having them read and discuss the works, having them read and discuss information related to writing a research essay, and having them complete activities that tried to merge the two (emphasis on tried). Though the class itself did not go as planned, I did enjoy the final research essay and presentations they did because I ultimately asked them to choose a theme from the books they were reading, and research a specific issue that interests them with regards to that theme. I think it was in this “letting go” of my own egotistical drive to teach a specific idea (i.e. literature) and allowing them to work on a project that would interest them that I finally found a pedagogy I wanted to pursue with further teaching experience--a pedagogy based on student-centric learning and inquiry.

After graduating with my Master’s degree, I found myself back at Wiregrass teaching as a full time English Instructor. During my time at Wiregrass, I was tasked with teaching a course that was essentially Composition I & II merged into a single semester, an American literature course, and a foundational grammar course. I did not enjoy my time at Wiregrass because the overly rigid structure of the institution (everyone had to be there from 8am-5pm daily), the lack of support from the department and administration, and the constant infantilizing of the student population created an atmosphere that I thought was antithetical to learning. That being said, my time at Wiregrass did show me that my passions and drive as a teacher are in teaching literature. While I may have been irritated by the overall atmosphere and dismayed at the nonsensical structure of their composition course, I was able to find solace in teaching literature and, much to my surprise, teaching it in a way that encouraged students to get engaged with reading and discussing the assigned works.

After a short stint at Wiregrass, I was offered a position as an English Lecturer at VSU. Here, I was asked to teach a 5/5 load for the Fall and Spring semesters. For each semester, I was responsible for four composition courses and one literature course (a world literature survey). During the composition classes especially, I was able to focus on teaching composition using multi-modal forms in a way that emphasized a student-centric, inquiry, and collaborative based pedagogy. From having students write literacy narratives as short comics in Composition I to allowing students to research, explore, and write about major social topics expressed in graphic novels during Composition II, I became far more confident in my abilities to structure a Composition course, a lesson plan, and in-class activities in ways that engaged students and drew them into their learning processes. Yet, even as my confidence and experience with the Composition courses grew, the opportunities to teach a world literature survey both semesters continued to prove to me that the literature classroom is where I feel most comfortable and confident.