Hello! My name is Kristi Dao.

When I think about who I strive to be as a teacher, the image that comes to my mind is Fred Rogers. The kind of teacher I strive to be is one who wants to be a better neighbor in my community and who is able to foster student agency and collaboration in the classroom and beyond it. I strive to cultivate classrooms where students are frequently encouraged to imagine ambitious futures for themselves and are encouraged to seek out rich learning opportunities in and out of the classroom, and I believe this can be done through a combination of multimodality, disability studies, feminist pedagogy, and student-centered learning. 

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My goal is to provide space for students to engage with different literacies and to foster student agency and collaboration. I emphasize developing multimodal skills because I believe that it aligns with composition goals such as writing processes and adaption, multiple literacies and goal setting, variation across contexts, decision making and production, and writing and power. Students will have opportunities to make meaning through  different rhetorical situations, modalities, and composing practices to build rhetorical awareness of texts and technologies. I am especially excited to engage with my students in a way that will get them to take risks and apply these critical thinking skills beyond the classroom. I encourage students to develop an eportfolio that showcases and synthesizes the skillsets they have developed so that they can highlight the ways that they are prepared to enter the job market. I aim to communicate to students that the skills they learn in my composition class are applicable and transferable far beyond the four walls of my classroom and our campus.

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Jay Dolmage has a beautiful metaphor for communication about how you cannot communicate in isolation. That is why I believe in student-centered learning and collaboration. As a teacher of writing, I am committed to using peer review in my classes. By reading and commenting on other students' work in small cooperative groups, my students learn to find their voice, to understand the important connection between writer and audience, and to hone their editing skills. Small group work is indispensable in the writing classroom and fosters collaboration. By asking students to engage in the writing and creation process, and to articulate their development and needs as writers, they establish shared responsibility for course content and seek to make connections between what is learned in the classroom and the world outside of it. I hope that engagement in my classroom then translates into their lives beyond education as critical consumers and communicators who interact with texts and media in the world in a  global, local, and digital context.

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A conversation with Andrea Lunsford made me realize that I want to establish an inclusive, accessible classroom that supports student learning. I value challenging students to explore new subject matter and test their abilities as communicators and collaborators. One of my aims as a teacher is to listen to students, value their experiences, linguistic diversity, cultural backgrounds and differences, and center collaboration and conversation as avenues for learning and making meaning. The same way that Lunsford would be asked a question, and then answer, “I think this about that, but what do you think?” is how I want to approach learning within my classroom. I do not want to give them all the answers; I want to speculate with them to create a shared sense of knowledge based on their experiences and what they know. These conversations showcase pedagogical values of critical thinking, curiosity, rhetorical awareness, research, and metacognition.

Through this combination of multimodality, disability studies, feminist pedagogy, and student-centered learning, I know that I will be able to adequately support my students in the classroom and learn from them so that we can mutually grow and better our communities.