Teaching media and literature in the English and American Studies departments at UC Berkeley for the past seven years, I have had the chance to use my classical education in literary and aesthetic theory, while also learning on the job what it means to teach mass culture from an interdisciplinary perspective. During this time, I have also seen the profession from the perspectives of both administrator and teacher, and from the vantage points of more than one discipline. I began my career teaching English reading and composition courses, and assisted with several lecture classes; later, I worked as an administrator to an undergraduate peer learning program, and as the instructor for my own upper-division lecture courses and seminars in American Studies and English. No matter what I am teaching, the bottom line for me is to make my classes relevant and accessible to a diverse student population.
In English and American Studies, as well as the American Cultures and Interdisciplinary Studies Programs, I have had the pleasure of teaching a population of students who are not only culturally diverse, but also from a whole range of majors. My aim, therefore, has always been to choose materials and topics which will help the students develop writing and critical thinking skills for their chosen fields and for what often gets called "the real world," that is the world of work and social responsibility outside of college. To this end, I attempt to draw a connection between the texts we cover in class and their social contexts; and I balance literary or critical writings with mainstream, popular narratives that are a part of most students' day-to-day cultural landscapes. Ultimately, the idea is to make even the most familiar objects "unfamiliar" under the lens of critical study and analysis.
My interest in making classroom materials relevant to students' lives led me to take on an administrative role in an English department learning program called Student Led English Discussions (SLED). As SLED Coordinator during the 1996-97 academic year, I was responsible for organizing undergraduates into discussion sections associated with over a dozen lecture courses. Students in SLED earn credit for meeting once a week, writing up regular reports on classroom lectures and readings, and engaging in peer editing exercises. During my tenure as SLED Coordinator, I created the SLED Web, a website where students are able to engage in interactive "public journal" writing projects. The online journals have become a regular feature of the SLED program.
After designing and teaching a number of introductory literature and composition courses, I was also given the opportunity to teach an American Cultures seminar in English which focused specifically on multiculturalism. Entitled "The Model Minority," the course dealt with stereotypes of "model minorities" in film and literature produced after World War II. This coming semester, I have been hired as a lecturer in English to teach a senior seminar on "horror and violence after 1930;" like my other English literature courses, this seminar is a comparative look at violent representations in film, television, and writing. A similarly comparative approach has characterized the core lecture courses I've taught on methods in American Studies. One such course, on U.S. popular culture of the 1970s, was so successful that the American Studies department adopted it as a permanent part of its curriculum. I am presently in the process of designing a new class I've been hired to teach next summer in American Studies. Focused on the cultural history of San Francisco, it will offer students a chance to study San Francisco as both an icon and an actual city; looking at social theories, pop culture, and film about San Francisco from 1865 to the present, I will be exploring how representations of a particular (famous) place form their own peculiar type of historical narrative. I would be eager to teach interdisciplinary courses this sort again, as well as ones which are focused entirely on media analysis and history.
My English composition courses, which I taught regularly as a graduate student, reflect my interest in twentieth century American literature and culture; I have designed courses which showcase both, and which thematize relevant issues such as "literary fantasy," "realism," "American identities," "corporate and anti-corporate culture," and "the tyranny of the normal." In all my teaching endeavors, and in my administrative work, I aim to reach the broadest possible audience with my ideas. I also want to create an organized environment where fairness and thoughtful inquisitiveness are rewarded.
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