My life has been enriched because of the care teachers have shown me, at all levels of my education, and my greatest ambition is to pass that forward to students of my own. A love of teaching and mentoring lies at the heart of everything I do. Before coming to graduate school, I worked as a private social studies and English tutor for middle school students in New York City. I adored the students I tutored, but I was troubled by my participation in a system of educational inequity wherein children of the elite have access to private tutoring, something out-of-reach for families without significant financial resources. I now volunteer weekly at the Durham Literacy Center to tutoring GED/HiSet students, which is a better reflection of my commitment to educational equity for all.

My positions as a teaching assistant at Duke have been both challenging and deeply rewarding. The students I have taught, and those whom I mentor through the Mellon Humanities Unbounded MicroWorlds Lab, have shown me how to be a better instructor and remind me constantly just how wonderful learning history can be. Through working as a consultant at the Thompson Writing Program Writing Studio, I learned student-led approaches to writing instruction, approaches that help students develop their own resources and “toolkits” to draw from as they tackle assignments.

 

Pictured above: a poster in Paris’s 18th arrondissement.