Inside the classroom

Teaching is about changing a student’s world — and my own — through the shared experience of work in the classroom. My teaching practice falls into 4 rough categories:

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• literature courses (usually taught in translation)

• courses for freshmen focused on teaching writing skills

• Russian language courses at all levels, and

• interdisciplinary courses.

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When I teach, I seek to create a community of learners, an environment for asking questions and developing both individual approaches and communal consensus. I encourage students to become suspicious of clearcut answers and to entertain multiple perspectives. In the literature classroom, I focus on helping students develop their abilities to read texts closely, to find textual support for their viewpoints, and encourage them to find ways to negotiate conflicting interpretations. In the language classroom, though at the beginning students may be limited, the goal is fluency — which means knowing different ways to communicate.

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Please see each of the sections for more information about my teaching praxis.