Since 2015, I’ve taught creative writing in schools & in community arts spaces. Scroll down to read more :)

A friend of mine who’s been teaching for awhile says we teach because we want to continue learning; that teaching is one of the best ways to remain curious—about ourselves, each other, and our shared world.

To me, this invokes the discipline of the writer as well, whose task is to observe with great precision, interpret/make meaning of her observations, and seek transformation/significance by writing it all down. Raúl Zurita says, “Above all, poetry is solidarity and compassion for every detail of the world.” Mary Oliver instructs, “Pay attention / Be astonished / Tell about it” which could be the poetic equivalent of the 3-part thesis: What do I notice? How does this thing I notice work? Why does it matter? If we’re paying attention, these questions are woven into the fabric of our lives. Ultimately, to teach writing is to invite folks to see that they are already practitioners of language and that writing is a form of thinking. This thinking emerges by studying what moves us, what flummoxes and bewilders us, reaching through language to share it with others. Don’t we also need this skill in our civic fora, relationships, work places, home spaces, and myriad other projects of our living? Which is to say, writing prepares us for life! 

While it’s true that many of us teach because we want to remain lifelong learners, I teach, equally, because I believe in the transformative and liberatory potential of education. My classroom, whether at a school or in a public library, is a fundamentally political space, that is, a space that aims to support students in becoming confident agents of change and action in their lives and communities. June Jordan calls the classroom “an experimental and hopeful society,” or what I might call a kind of utopia. What’s more powerful than engaging together over history, literature, ceramics, biology, architecture, etc., to study, question, and reimagine our worlds? Whether we’re identifying rhetorical devices, drafting personal essays, or close reading a terminal period in a poem, the most critical project is in our collaboration: sharing our unique perspectives and caring for one another, across our inevitable (thank god) differences! 

Along with a hopeful and experimental society, the classroom is a sensitive ecosystem that requires water and light, movement, fresh air, and is subject to the many ordeals of aliveness, from terror to joy. Good learning happens when we attend first to that ecosystem, creating a community of trust within serious and sometimes conflictual baseline components of diversity: race, language, sexuality, class, age, gender, and other intersecting aspects of identity that potently shape worldview. In my experience, this is possible under a few conditions: 1) snacks! 2) all participants need to know they are essential and valued co-creators of our space, 3) we begin by establishing clear expectations for how we engage together, including how we repair when difficulties arise, 4) we cultivate a spirit of practice, experiment, and play rather than “mastery,” 5) participants are encouraged to take risks, make mistakes, and share from their own authentic experiences rather than striving for normative notions of success, otherwise known as “shoulds”…

As Paolo Freire, bell hooks, and so many other scholars remind us: education is an instrument of liberation and cultural transformation. Whether I’m working in the community or in an academic setting, I aim for revolutionary learning via affirmation and care, responding intuitively to the changing and varied needs of my students. Ultimately, teaching is a deeply improvisational art form that requires us to deepen our capacity for uncertainty, to listen and learn as we go. What a grand adventure. I love my students (who are also my teachers) and I’m grateful to the many brilliant teachers who came before me, who have long held open the door and ushered us inside.