Teaching Experience
While completing my MFA at Chapman University, I worked as a part-time lecturer and developed a first-year writing and composition course. I designed and taught English 103, a seminar dedicated to helping students strengthen their rhetorical awareness and writing skills across academic contexts. The course emphasized adaptability—students engaged with a variety of composing topics, genres, and audiences, learning how to analyze rhetorical situations and respond with purpose and clarity. My approach centered on fostering critical thinking, encouraging student voice, and building confidence in writing as both an academic and personal tool.
Spanglish Rhetorics
This course examined the role of Spanglish within standard rhetorical practices, with a particular focus on its use as a composition tool for multilingual learners. Students who grew up in and around the borderlands often encountered multilingualism in their homes and communities from an early age, which influenced their verbal and written composition strategies both within and beyond academic contexts.
Students used their existing knowledge as a foundation to expand their command of Spanglish across a variety of social and cultural settings. Throughout the semester, we studied texts, videos, and stories from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds to better understand the ways in which Spanglish played a meaningful and beneficial role in the work of multilingual creators.
Together, we placed linguistic hybridity into dialogue to explore how communities and identities are created, represented, and remembered through rhetoric. We also examined how Spanglish challenged the conventions of Standard Written English (SWE), offering alternative avenues for composition grounded in its hybridity, history, and lived experience.
