Tag: instructor spotlight

Introducing Incoming CIC AD: Missy González-Garduño

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A brown haired man and woman in black rain jackets, standing in front of the Drumheller Fountain at the University of Washington.

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.

An Interview with New EWP Director Stephanie Kerschbaum

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Headshot image of Stephanie Kerschbaum in front of a gray background

By Alycia Gilbert, Stephanie Kerschbaum

How does your research or teaching philosophy influence your approach to directing UW’s Expository Writing Program?

One track of my research centers on thinking about the ways that disability materializes or takes shape through everyday interactions. In this work I think a lot about how bodies become available for noticing and how that sensory perception translates into meaning. 

What does this set of questions about noticing disability mean for EWP directorship? For one thing, it means that I’m working to ensure that conversations about access and accessibility are front and center of every aspect of our work here in EWP alongside our commitments to antiracist writing pedagogy and program praxis. 

Concretely, it means thinking about what kind of space the A-11 suite is for instructors and writing program admin team members. It means thinking about how we can build structures and practices that invite open conversation about access rather than funneling most of that discussion through individualized accommodation processes. It means asking after the experiences we create for students in our classes, whether in-person or hybrid.

A second thread of my research is interested in how writing classrooms function as spaces for engagement across difference. My book Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference takes up this question in considering how students negotiate giving feedback on each other’s writing in small-group peer review workshops. 

The core insight of that book that I carry with me every day is the reminder of how deeply personal and intimate the work of talking about writing is: it is not easy for people to separate getting feedback on their writing and getting feedback on themselves. The work that goes into being able to engage begins with learning about oneself and coming-to-know one’s own place in the world. Being open to engaging with others requires that we–as teachers, writing program team members, and peers–be open to what we don’t yet know about other people, rather than presuming to know them, and responding to their writing in ways that support growth, learning, and engagement rather than shutting down possibilities. 

What most excites you about taking on this position?

I truly have to say a big reason I was excited about this job was because the program is doing so many exciting things in thinking about what it means to ethically engage as communicators and learners producing and engaging all kinds of texts. The more I learned about what Candice Rai, building on the work of previous directors Anis Bawarshi, Juan Guerra, and Gail Stygall, had done in concert with many previous EWP team members, the more I wanted to be part of the team myself.

Hands down the best part of this job is who I get to work with. I’ve most gotten to know the phenomenal team of Assistant Directors–Taiko Aoki-Marcial, Francesca Colonnese, Alycia Gilbert, Missy González-Garduño, Anselma Prihandita, and Joe Wilson. I’m co-teaching with Sumyat Thu, who is also coordinating English 121 and community-engaged learning, and Michelle Liu, Associate Director of Writing Programs and coordinator of English 111 has been giving me so many great ideas and resources for thinking about working with first-year students at UW. And Jake Huebsch has been Program Coordinator Extraordinaire in helping me learn the ropes. 

And as I’ve gotten to know the instructors new to our program and teaching English 131 for the first time this fall, I continue to keep pinching myself that these are people I get to learn from and engage with as a teacher and program director. 

What new perspective do you hope to bring to our program?

I talked about this a bit above, but I think my expertise in critical disability studies puts me in strong position to continue to deepen the program’s attention to accessibility. I think this is a particularly important question right now, as we return to in-person learning while still experiencing a pandemic and the tremendous exhaustion and fatigue that characterize what it feels like to teach and learn in late 2021. What does it mean to create accessible environments? How can we ethically navigate the tensions and challenges around different access needs and expectations? How can we ensure that lessons learned through remote teaching and learning during 2020-21 are not simply abandoned or left aside in a quote-unquote “return to normal” that presumes the centrality of face-to-face in person interaction? 

Just a fun one: what’s your favorite thing you’ve done or seen in Seattle so far?

Gosh, there’s a lot! I’m a midwesterner at heart, and I’ve spent most of my life on land flattened by glaciers, so coming to Seattle and experiencing the mountains and the steep ups and downs has been so fun. My favorite view was a trip to Carkeek Park at high tide, thanks to a recommendation from Candice and being totally blown away by the mountains, the water, the beach, the trees. I feel very humbled by the natural beauty there is to explore here, and that I get to see the trees rising up along Lake Washington from my office window.

Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu to Get Involved!

Instructor Spotlight: Anselma Prihandita

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Photo of Anselma Prihandita

Quick Facts

Name: Anselma Widha Prihandita
Courses Taught: ENGL 131, ENGL 109/110
Pedagogical Touchstones: Critical Pedagogy ; Encouraging sensitivity and critical attitude to power relations, especially so that marginalized students can explain their discomforts in ways other than “it’s my fault,” as they’ve often been trained to do ; bell hooks’ “education as the practice of freedom”
Favorite Course Themes: Autoethnography, in which students did an autoethnographic research project on their own educational experiences in order to make sense of how colonial, Eurocentric, capitalist, white supremacist, etc. the university is.

Q: How have your studies influenced your teaching and/ or how has your teaching influenced your studies?

My experience as a student does influence my teaching. Being a first generation graduate student, a person of color, and an international student, I feel some affinity with students from similar backgrounds. I’m aware of how for people like me, the lessons we get in classrooms here are not always most culturally relevant or sustaining. Therefore, I try to craft curriculums with better diversity and representation—for example by grounding my syllabi on works by scholars of color, or by simply encouraging students to embark on projects that may not immediately be in the interest of the dominant public (or scholarly communities), but are nonetheless closer to their hearts and homes. I would say that my teaching is greatly inspired by decolonial theories, which broadly work toward a delinking from white Western knowledge. This influence also goes both ways: my studies now focus on decolonial pedagogies.

Q: Could you describe a particularly crucial, defining teaching moment you’ve had throughout your career? 

One memorable teaching experience that I had was my first time teaching ENGL 109 (a class reserved for students affiliated with the various student support programs under the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity). When I read my students’ preliminary essays, I noticed that almost all of them wrote about how they didn’t feel confident in their writing skills. Many spoke of how they were often told that their writing was not up to standard, even though it was perfectly fine. Seeing the emotional challenges that these students faced, since then I tried my best to support students not only by teaching them writing skills, but also by fostering the habits of mind, resilience, and self-assurance necessary to move within and through this higher education institution—an experience that can be hurtful to some people.

Q: After completing your degree, what are your plans professionally? Have these evolved since entering your program? How has your teaching evolved? 

Regarding my plans for after completing my degree, I honestly don’t know. I think a big part of that would be trying to decide whether I want to start a career here in the US or come back home to Indonesia. I left my home country thinking that I would definitely be coming back, but after 2 years here, sometimes I feel like I’m losing touch with that homeland. A lot of the things I’ve learned and practiced here are grounded on American contexts, which might not be easily translatable to how things are back home. I think that as you learn and teach, it’s very important to keep in perspective the context and geopolitics of the knowledge you’re gaining and practicing, and remember that nothing—not even pedagogies and theories—can be a one-size-fits-all kind of thing.