Hi all,
I wanted to introduce myself as the incoming Assistant Director for Computer Integrated Courses. My name is Missy González-Garduño, I am a second year PhD student on the literature and culture track. The picture on this post is my husband Angel and I on a gloomy day, standing in front of Drumheller fountain. Angel is also a second year PhD student on the literature and culture track.
Although I’m finishing my second year with the EWP, I’ve been teaching since 2018. I started teaching as a TA at CSU Fresno where I got my Master’s. From there I worked as an adjunct at a few different community colleges in California’s central valley. I was still adjuncting in 2020 when the pandemic first hit and we made the first move to fully online-learning. I was fortunate enough to be teaching two summer courses on two different community college campuses, but in order to keep those courses I had to get an online teaching certification from each campus. It was in those courses that I really began to understand and appreciate universal design for learning (UDL) and multimodality as important parts of my teaching. Despite the circumstances, I loved learning about the different possibilities online/hybrid learning offered, and wanted to make my courses as effective and engaging as I possibly could – for online-learning and beyond.
For me, teaching was, and continues to be, a process of unlearning. As a student I picked up a lot of problematic assumptions about learning and an instructor’s role in the classroom. The more I taught, the more I realized those assumptions were not only ineffective pedagogically, but had the potential to be harmful to students. One of my biggest obstacles was overcoming the idea that teaching should be a process of smoke and mirrors, keeping students guessing at every turn rather than guiding them transparently through the material. I also had to overcome a lot of problematic ideas about myself as disciplinarian and authority in the classroom.
I firmly believe, as I know many of you do, that teaching is a continual process of learning and unlearning. We are always learning alongside our students and each other. Which is why being an AD is such a fun experience for me. I love hearing about what other folks are doing in their classrooms, talking through pedagogies, and hearing unique perspectives on all aspects of teaching writing.
Maintaining Compendium is one of my main EWP projects throughout the next academic year and I’m very excited about the various possibilities the blog has to offer to create an accessible resource for teaching and community-building across the EWP.