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My philosophy is that writing can be taught. It is a skill that can be mastered if engaged in consistently and tenaciously; if given engaging enough prompts as a springboard to ideas. I also believe in teaching writing from the inside out, to take a personal experience and contextualize it to arrive at some larger truth about the self or about some aspect of society. As such, we read widely and variously in my class, essays culled from a variety of sources and on a variety of subjects. Essays that themselves act as models of great writing. From time to time I focus a semester's work around a single theme--such as the use of oral histories or the impact of childhood memories. Often, I have students work on self-generated subjects that are of great importance to themselves. There is a lot of challenging discussion, dissection and examinations in my writing classes.
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