About Me

Welcome to my academic website, which focuses primarily on my areas of teaching expertise, as well as community partnerships I have developed during the past 10 years teaching at universities in Boston and Madison, WI.  I have doctoral training in Composition and Rhetoric, Literary Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies. I currently focus on teaching writing courses that incorporate community engagement (also called “service learning”) into my course design. These courses provide meaningful opportunities for students to support the mission of local non-profit organizations, and to benefit from the depth of knowledge that community members have generously shared with us in recent semesters. 

On the Teaching pages of this site you will find information about two important areas of focus for my community-engaged teaching:  Food Justice and Immigrants and Refugees in the U.S.  I have taught both First-Year Writing and Advanced Writing courses with the thematic framing of Food Justice, an interdisciplinary theme that appeals to students across majors and professional tracks. It is also a topic that every student will connect with in personal and cultural terms, and those individual investments shape the course in new ways every semester.  The topic is also a very powerful one for centering the exemplary research, activism, and creative work of people of color across many fields––as scholars, journalists, community food activists, and filmmakers. We study and write about inspiring work from Monica H. White, Robin Kimmerer, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Eric Holt-Giménez, Will Allen, Teresa Mares, and Sanjay Rawal (preceding links take you to a profile or relevant video).

I have developed other thematic frameworks for First-Year Writing–including courses focused on race and equity in higher education, literacy and identity, and climate crisis. Most of my classes where I am currently teaching enroll a high proportion of international and multilingual students, which has challenged me to shift my approach to FYW. Many of these students have grown up in educational spaces that automatically impose a deficit framing on their linguistic abilities. In collaboration with these students, I began developing a curriculum that invites students to understand the many cognitive, social and health benefits of being bilingual or multilingual, to flip that set of assumptions. We have also investigated the deep history of how English became the dominant language globally in so many domains, and the consequences of that history for linguistic diversity, especially for indigenous communities. These topics and others–– code-switching , migration & writing, language brokering in immigrant families––are ones that inform the “Global English” thematic framing of my current First-Year Writing course. Further details about this course and others are posted on the Teaching pages of this site.

COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIPS ~ Another important focus for my time commitments and writing skills has been partnering with non-profit sites to connect them with students, and to bring in more resources for their efforts through joint grant-writing projects. Lifeboat Boston Food Pantry is where students in my Food Justice courses first began volunteering in 2020––a site that supports mostly immigrant residents and continued operating through the entire COVID pandemic, doubling their weekly distribution days to meet increased needs in the neighborhood. My students continue to learn from Lifeboat’s organizers and their dedication to community welfare and justice, including the tireless pantry coordinator, Nansee Ong–who works full time in healthcare and runs an international business––and Marlon Wallen, who has been an advocate for immigrants and those living with HIV/AIDS for over three decades.

The most welcoming community partner for our collaborations has been an extraordinary organization based in Jamaica Plain founded nearly 20 years ago, the Dominican Development Center. Magalis Troncoso Lama, the DDC’s Executive Director and frequently honored community leader, has mentored many students from our campus’s Latinx Student Community Center––especially students who are training for careers in the health professions. The pages on Grant Writing provide some details about the projects we have worked on together during the past 6 years, including a storytelling grant from the Mass Humanities Council. And the Student Profiles pages introduce you to some of the accomplished students who have worked with me to support these organizations.