DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.


"Whenever I want my cat to look at something instructive  a full moon, say, or a photograph of herself  a predictable choreography ensues. I
point at the thing I want her to look at, and she, roused to curiosity,
fixes her attention on the tip of my extended index finger and begins to explore it with delicate sniffs. 


"Every time this scene of failed pedagogy gets enacted (and it's frequent, because I am no better at learning not to point than my cat is at learning not to sniff) the two of us are caught in a pedagogical problematic that has fascinated teachers of Buddhism since Sakamuni. In fact, its technical name in Buddhist writing is 'pointing at the moon,' and it opens up a range of issues about both language and the nonlinguistic that became engaging to Western teachers and learners only in the twentieth century."

Eve Sedgewick: Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 2003.




My philosophy on teaching focuses on increasing opportunities for students to make decisions on what they read and write about. In order to support those decisions, I provide a critical framework of analysis and production based on a series of iterative and contingent questions:


  • What do we value? How did we come to value that?
  • How do we know what is true and what is not?
  • What forms of rhetoric, argument, and advocacy do we need in order for our work to be taken seriously in academic, creative, and community contexts?

These intellectual and critical-thinking foundations for our work allow for co-inquiry into texts and writing situations  since I do not always know the answers to those questions  and we are able to develop collective expertise together: to practice academic and professional forms of oral, written, and visual modes of communication together.


DRAFT: This module has unpublished changes.