Penn State
Instructor of Record: ESL 15 (2025-2026), Introductory Writing for International Students
Click here for audio mini-lectures about key writing concepts in ESL15.
Instructor of Record: ESL 118G (2025), ITA Preparation for Teaching in U.S. University 3
Instructor of Record: ESL 117G (2026), ITA Preparation for Teaching in U.S. University 2
The University of Kentucky
Instructor of Record: LIN 211 (2022-2023), Introduction to the Study of Language
Instructor of Record: LIN 200 (2022-2023), How to Create Your Own Language
Jeollanamdo International Education Institute (전라남도 국제교육원)
Instructor of Record: (2019-2021), Listening and Speaking Skills
Teaching Philosophy (working draft)
Learning can be fun, empowering, and transformative. Yet that same process can simultaneously be difficult, frustrating, and vulnerable. It’s particularly vulnerable because it’s non-linear. We cannot always predict which materials, and which utterances will rupture into new understandings. Every student will experience different ruptures. To rupture is to render oneself vulnerable, and vulnerability is therefore essential to the flow and flux of teaching and learning. When I teach, my first goal is therefore to model vulnerability. After all, if I do not model vulnerability for my students, how can I expect my students to bring their vulnerability into the classroom?
I responsibly bring vulnerability into the classroom in three ways.
First, I plan less and engage more. Rather than walking into a classroom with a well-defined linear lesson plan, I come to class with a text, a question, and an experience facillitated through a repertoire of interaction patterns I gleaned as an EFL teacher in South Korea. In one such example, I printed out paragraph completion questions from the Turkish college entrance exam and challenged students to not only find the answer of best fit, but to also articulate why the other answers were not it. This created an experience for students to not only think critically about paragraph cohesion, but also to approach a genre that they’ve often encountered before university — namely, college entrance examination questions — with fresh eyes. For instance, what do the topics and messages present in Turkish college entrance exam paragraph completion questions tell us about the hopes, fears, and dreams of the Turkish Ministry of Education? When I come to class, I therefore aim to immerse students in experiences that can recontextualize mundane genres into new avenues of learning.
Second, I seek out texts that are beyond the comfort zone of my white male U.S. English positionality. It’s valuable for students to engage with texts not only produced in the Western canon but also texts that form counter-stories against that canon. I’ve assigned passages from diverse texts including Translingual Practice by Suresh Canagarajah, A Concise English-Chinese Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo, Borderlands/ La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa, We Will Be Jaguars by Nemonte Nenquimo, and The End of August by Yu Miri, among others. For ESL students, I choose texts that (1) play with language beyond assumed academic norms, while also (2) allowing each student to see parts of their language, history, or culture reflected within the ESL curriculum. Yet this also puts me in a vulnerable place, for I must also lean on students to provide insight into parts of a multilingual text that are opaque to me as an L1 English speaker. This does not to spotlight students to “speak for” a particular intersectional identity, but rather to explore how diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds lead to diverse readings of texts.
Finally, I model vulnerability to my students by emphasizing video and multimodal feedback. Rather than hiding behind the red pen, I put my face before the camera and use screen-sharing technology on Canvas to provide specific, targeted, and constructive feedback unique to each student. Feedback in this way comes to resemble dialogue more than correction, focusing on students as writers-in-becoming rather than deficient learners in need of remediation. Furthermore, such feedback shows how I extemporaneously think with students’ writing rather than providing polished comments from on high. Reciprocally, I also require students to submit their homework as a recording where they (1) think with an assigned text or (2) read their writing aloud. This practice not only creates reciprocal vulnerability, but also requires students to stand behind what they think and write by literally interpolating their own embodied voice. Also, with out-of-class work taking the form of a personalized asynchronous dialogue, in-class time affords more divergent learning experiences — experiences not always linearly connected to out-of-class written assignments. Instead, such experiences unfold into a large surface area of potentialities for students to make connections or see the world through recontextualized eyes.
To sum up, I do not teach in a straight line. I prefer to teach across a twisted path — a path where I surrender part of my expertise to create a community where students co-create knowledge with me and with each other. The takeaways that I finish classes with are not pre-planned, but emergent. They emerge from my own immanent, spontaneous thinking. In other words, I teach and think with my students, rather than at them.
