Welcome to my mini-blog devoted to my weekly reflections on the course readings for Carmen Kynard’s African American Literacies and Education spring 2016 class at the CUNY Graduate Center! (For more on the class, check out the awesome course website here!)
In this blog, I will respond to the weekly writing prompt questions that Carmen provides, while grappling with how my body — ensconced in white privilege — interacts with Black and other POC literacies in my writing classrooms.
This mini-blog will enable me to write through teaching as I teach writing at CUNY Queens College. Since we often encourage students to write through their thoughts, I will use this space to write through mine, endeavoring to post about lesson planning, dis/ability in the classroom, and curricular design.
Throughout my period of Orals exam incubation, I will be immersed in composition/rhetoric scholarship, dis/ability studies, and children’s/YA literature. To help keep my thoughts (somewhat) organized, I will use this Annotated Bibliography mini-blog to post my responses to texts that I find particularly generative for my thinking.
Hello, and welcome to my web-space for exploring literature, teaching, writing, and the teaching of writing (I will endeavor to keep this online forum better organized than my various scrawl-marked notebooks).
An assortment of my writing notebooks on a bookshelf, accompanied by several published texts. Photo by Jennifer Polish
I am an instructor of first year composition at CUNY Queens College while pursuing my PhD at the CUNY Graduate Center.
As a teacher, I am dedicated to student-centered pedagogical practices that create writing environments meant to affirm students’ own expertise while encouraging critical thinking and growth.
As a researcher, interests include affective whiteness in writing classrooms and the intersections of dis/ability, race, and trauma in children’s literature and media.
I am currently working on my first novel, a queer YA fantasy, the writing process for which is intimately informed by both my teaching and academic research.
