Statement of Teaching Philosophy

I believe in a student-centered, constructivist approach to learning. As someone who experienced graduate school in both a traditional venue and a low-residency setting, who studied theory for my MA and practical applications of those theories for my MFA, I want to be an encouraging teacher who helps guide and empower students with individual attention. I want to practice a progressive pedagogy that takes into account the latest research on how the best ways to help writers both in the classroom and out.
My teaching philosophy, which reflects the way I was taught by mentors such as Marvin Bell and Dorianne Laux, includes the desire to help each student develop their own individual writing talents, not to make them into cookie-cutter MFA poets. I want to collaborate with students by listening to their suggestions, finding out their leanings and background, and making, for instance, reading recommendations accordingly. In a workshop setting, I think it’s very important for the workshop leader not to be a dictator but someone who sets the tone and helps keep the discussion focused on improving a specific piece of work, instead of letting the discussion devolve into personal attacks or unhelpful side discussions. Of the several things I’ve learned in workshop settings, it’s to give equal priority to every person’s poem, rather than letting one person’s work take over the entire time, and to have someone who is a side-by-side participant in the discussion but also an enabler for the appropriate level of conversation.
I want to participate as a writer of poetry with the poetry students in any discoveries and exercises in the classroom. And, during the correspondence part of a low-residency program, it is extremely important to be flexible and respond to the student’s readings and explorations, to help guide them as writers. As a practicing writer myself, I hope to bring the expertise I continue to seek from more mature writers, and to practice the discipline of writing myself, as I encourage students. I also want to help students towards their next steps, whether that might be a chapbook manuscript, their first literary magazine publication, or participation in the literary community as a teacher or publisher. I want to help students see the bigger picture in the poetry world, stay abreast of current discussions of poetry, and help see their own work in the context of the writers that came before and will come after.