Teaching Philosophy
As a feminist disability scholar, I believe it is critical to make classrooms and educational spaces accessible to all. I create classroom communities where all parties have an equitable stake in the work of teaching and learning through student-centered pedagogical practices that encourage engagement for both disabled and non-disabled students without forcing moments of unnecessary disclosure. Some of these strategies include additional labor on my part, such as making accessible copies of texts and handouts available online and creating opportunities for both technological and physical participation, but others encourage students to generate knowledge and perform classroom labor themselves, taking turns in sharing the collective work of creating accommodation and access, generally through note-sharing, collaboration, and shared responsibility to one another.
These combined strategies create a stronger sense of shared community in the classroom and enable students to feel empowered. I recognize that students learn differently, and therefore I offer multiple avenues for students to engage with texts (both their own and those of others) in ways that honor their own practices as readers, writers, and thinkers. Using principles of universal design for learning, I create several versions of an assignment so that students can choose what best accommodates their learning needs or challenge themselves to push past what they already know and try something new, all while working toward a standard set of learning goals. While the university itself may determine our learning outcomes for the course as a whole, my students and I collaborate on the grading rubrics for individual assignments. Students choose categories for evaluation based on the prompt, and collectively determine how many points each aspect of the assignment should earn. These co-constructed rubrics enable students to better understand how they are being assessed, thereby giving them strong, clear stakes in their own learning. By allowing students to participate in assessment and choose their own paths toward achieving learning outcomes, they begin to see their educational lives as a self-directed practice, rather than a prescribed way of being. These flexible strategies are also particularly useful in helping students with disabilities, linguistic challenges, and students from educationally underprivileged backgrounds find ways to enter into the practices and procedures of university life, and to provide accommodations to help them do so wherever possible.
My commitment to diversity is evident not only in my pedagogical practices, but also in my course topics. My literature and writing courses incorporate works by and about disabled subjects, as well as the works of women, people of color, and queer writers and artists on the margins of canonicity. When I teach American literature, I seek to elevate the voices and values of marginalized communities; I ask students to engage with the ways representation brushes against reality in historical, political, and social contexts. I treat the body as a key site of inquiry in both my teaching and research, inquiring into processes by which bodies are constructed as American, and how bodies participate or are denied participation in American literature, history, and lived experience.
Being in a classroom with my students is my favorite part of university life. I am energized by the critical conversations that emerge in classroom spaces. I challenge my students to participate in conversations that examine artistic products like literature, film, theatre, television, and performance art. I ask them to think about these objects in relationship to the world in which they were produced, and to discuss how these cultural products might reveal, conceal, complicate, critique, or perpetuate particular ideologies and -isms. I teach my students about diverse bodies and how the concept of the human is formed through competing cultural discourses which tell us which bodies matter, and which bodies do not. I hope that by discussing these things, my students begin to understand the power of putting theory into practice and learn that they too have voices (and bodies) that matter.
These combined strategies create a stronger sense of shared community in the classroom and enable students to feel empowered. I recognize that students learn differently, and therefore I offer multiple avenues for students to engage with texts (both their own and those of others) in ways that honor their own practices as readers, writers, and thinkers. Using principles of universal design for learning, I create several versions of an assignment so that students can choose what best accommodates their learning needs or challenge themselves to push past what they already know and try something new, all while working toward a standard set of learning goals. While the university itself may determine our learning outcomes for the course as a whole, my students and I collaborate on the grading rubrics for individual assignments. Students choose categories for evaluation based on the prompt, and collectively determine how many points each aspect of the assignment should earn. These co-constructed rubrics enable students to better understand how they are being assessed, thereby giving them strong, clear stakes in their own learning. By allowing students to participate in assessment and choose their own paths toward achieving learning outcomes, they begin to see their educational lives as a self-directed practice, rather than a prescribed way of being. These flexible strategies are also particularly useful in helping students with disabilities, linguistic challenges, and students from educationally underprivileged backgrounds find ways to enter into the practices and procedures of university life, and to provide accommodations to help them do so wherever possible.
My commitment to diversity is evident not only in my pedagogical practices, but also in my course topics. My literature and writing courses incorporate works by and about disabled subjects, as well as the works of women, people of color, and queer writers and artists on the margins of canonicity. When I teach American literature, I seek to elevate the voices and values of marginalized communities; I ask students to engage with the ways representation brushes against reality in historical, political, and social contexts. I treat the body as a key site of inquiry in both my teaching and research, inquiring into processes by which bodies are constructed as American, and how bodies participate or are denied participation in American literature, history, and lived experience.
Being in a classroom with my students is my favorite part of university life. I am energized by the critical conversations that emerge in classroom spaces. I challenge my students to participate in conversations that examine artistic products like literature, film, theatre, television, and performance art. I ask them to think about these objects in relationship to the world in which they were produced, and to discuss how these cultural products might reveal, conceal, complicate, critique, or perpetuate particular ideologies and -isms. I teach my students about diverse bodies and how the concept of the human is formed through competing cultural discourses which tell us which bodies matter, and which bodies do not. I hope that by discussing these things, my students begin to understand the power of putting theory into practice and learn that they too have voices (and bodies) that matter.
Courses Taught
Writing Classes
English 131G, Autumn 2010 - Composition -- Exposition: "Language & Identity"
English 131I, Winter 2013 - Composition -- Exposition: "Language & Identity"
English 131D, Spring 2011 - Composition -- Exposition: "Critical Fashion: Styling the Self, Styling the Body"
English 297, Winter 2012 - Intermediate Writing for the Humanities
English 281, Spring 2014 - Intermediate Expository Writing: "Performance"
Literature Classes
English 301, Autumn 2011 - Gateway to the English Major (Teaching Assistant)
English 301, Autumn 2012 - Gateway to the English Major (Teaching Assistant)
English 244A, Winter 2013 - Reading Drama: "Performing Freakishness: Reading Disability Onstage"
English 242F, Spring 2013 - Reading Fiction: "Monstrosity in 19th & 20th Century American Literature"
English 200B, Fall 2013 - Reading Literary Forms: "Writing the Body"
English 200C, Winter 2014 - Reading Literary Forms: "Writing the Body"
English 131G, Autumn 2010 - Composition -- Exposition: "Language & Identity"
English 131I, Winter 2013 - Composition -- Exposition: "Language & Identity"
English 131D, Spring 2011 - Composition -- Exposition: "Critical Fashion: Styling the Self, Styling the Body"
English 297, Winter 2012 - Intermediate Writing for the Humanities
English 281, Spring 2014 - Intermediate Expository Writing: "Performance"
Literature Classes
English 301, Autumn 2011 - Gateway to the English Major (Teaching Assistant)
English 301, Autumn 2012 - Gateway to the English Major (Teaching Assistant)
English 244A, Winter 2013 - Reading Drama: "Performing Freakishness: Reading Disability Onstage"
English 242F, Spring 2013 - Reading Fiction: "Monstrosity in 19th & 20th Century American Literature"
English 200B, Fall 2013 - Reading Literary Forms: "Writing the Body"
English 200C, Winter 2014 - Reading Literary Forms: "Writing the Body"
Sample Course Descriptions & Syllabi
English 131D: Composition -- Exposition
Critical Fashion: Styling the Self, Styling the Body
This section of English 131 is designed to help you cultivate academic writing skills that will benefit you throughout your college career (and beyond). Over the course of the quarter, you will learn to read, think, and write critically. This means that you will read texts carefully and contemplate not only what they say, but how they say it and why. You will be able to identify the strategies that writers use in different rhetorical situations and assess the effectiveness of those choices. You will also develop research skills that will enable you to follow a line of inquiry and create complex, analytic arguments about relevant issues. Most importantly, you will be able utilize these skills in your own writing by following a process of drafting and revision.
To facilitate these writing goals, we will look critically at the fashion industry, commodity culture, and contemporary issues of embodiment. We will investigate what it means to style ourselves and style our bodies. Course texts will include essays on the dissemination of style, subculture, advertising, photography, body disorders, tattooing and body modification, disability, prosthesis, and cyborg embodiment, as well as photographs of fashion lines and episodes of television shows such as What Not to Wear, Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model.
Critical Fashion: Styling the Self, Styling the Body
This section of English 131 is designed to help you cultivate academic writing skills that will benefit you throughout your college career (and beyond). Over the course of the quarter, you will learn to read, think, and write critically. This means that you will read texts carefully and contemplate not only what they say, but how they say it and why. You will be able to identify the strategies that writers use in different rhetorical situations and assess the effectiveness of those choices. You will also develop research skills that will enable you to follow a line of inquiry and create complex, analytic arguments about relevant issues. Most importantly, you will be able utilize these skills in your own writing by following a process of drafting and revision.
To facilitate these writing goals, we will look critically at the fashion industry, commodity culture, and contemporary issues of embodiment. We will investigate what it means to style ourselves and style our bodies. Course texts will include essays on the dissemination of style, subculture, advertising, photography, body disorders, tattooing and body modification, disability, prosthesis, and cyborg embodiment, as well as photographs of fashion lines and episodes of television shows such as What Not to Wear, Gossip Girl and America’s Next Top Model.
| syllabus_131d-_spring_2011.docx |
English 200C: Reading Literary Forms
Writing the Body
This class will introduce students to critical reading strategies across a variety of genres, including novels, drama, short stories, film, television, and experimental writing. Each of texts in this class shares a common focus on the human body. By reading, discussing, and writing about our texts, we will inquire into the representation of the body and its connection to writing. In what ways are bodies “written”? How do we understand the body in writing? What happens when we write on a body or with a body?
Texts will include: Henry Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, Neil La Bute’s The Shape of Things, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo, Shelley Jackson’s “Skin” and Melancholy of Anatomy, Doug Wright’s Quills, episodes of House and Bones, The Twisted Twin’s film American Mary, and the Peter Greenaway film The Pillow Book.
Writing the Body
This class will introduce students to critical reading strategies across a variety of genres, including novels, drama, short stories, film, television, and experimental writing. Each of texts in this class shares a common focus on the human body. By reading, discussing, and writing about our texts, we will inquire into the representation of the body and its connection to writing. In what ways are bodies “written”? How do we understand the body in writing? What happens when we write on a body or with a body?
Texts will include: Henry Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Man with the Twisted Lip”, Neil La Bute’s The Shape of Things, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Sarah Hall’s The Electric Michelangelo, Shelley Jackson’s “Skin” and Melancholy of Anatomy, Doug Wright’s Quills, episodes of House and Bones, The Twisted Twin’s film American Mary, and the Peter Greenaway film The Pillow Book.
| syllabus_costa_english_200c_win13.docx |
English 242F: Reading Fiction
Monstrosities in 19th & 20th Century American Literature
“The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed an intriguing simultaneity or doubleness.” –Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996)
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness . . .” – W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
What defines the monstrous? Cohen regards the monster as an ambiguous figure, arising from the collapse of boundaries. His sentiments echo Du Bois’s description of the uncertain position of African Americans in post-slavery America, which suggests a correlation between race and monstrosity in the post-Civil War era. But this is not the only kind of monstrousness we will encounter, as the slippery ambiguity of the monster allows it to be shaped and reshaped by the culture in which it exists. Monsters, then, are not born, but made.
This class will inquire into the cultural understandings of the monstrous in 19th and 20th century American literature. By reading a range of novels and short stories about monsters, freaks, hybrids, and other curious subjects, we will come to know what kinds of bodies count as “monstrous,” and how monsters are “made” at different points in American history.
Monstrosities in 19th & 20th Century American Literature
“The monster is that uncertain cultural body in which is condensed an intriguing simultaneity or doubleness.” –Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (1996)
“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness . . .” – W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
What defines the monstrous? Cohen regards the monster as an ambiguous figure, arising from the collapse of boundaries. His sentiments echo Du Bois’s description of the uncertain position of African Americans in post-slavery America, which suggests a correlation between race and monstrosity in the post-Civil War era. But this is not the only kind of monstrousness we will encounter, as the slippery ambiguity of the monster allows it to be shaped and reshaped by the culture in which it exists. Monsters, then, are not born, but made.
This class will inquire into the cultural understandings of the monstrous in 19th and 20th century American literature. By reading a range of novels and short stories about monsters, freaks, hybrids, and other curious subjects, we will come to know what kinds of bodies count as “monstrous,” and how monsters are “made” at different points in American history.
| costa_english_242f_spring2013_syllabus.doc |
English 244A: Reading Drama
Performing Freakishness: Reading the Extraordinary Body Onstage
“I would prefer it where no one stared at me.” –Merrick, The Elephant Man
John Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, spent most of his adult life on display as a “freak” attraction throughout Europe in the late 19th century. During the same time period, Chang & Eng Bunker, General Tom Thumb, and Zip the What-Is-It? were working on the American side show circuit, making a profit (and usually enabling others to profit from) the performance of their bodily differences. The freak show as a performance genre coalesces a number of complex relationships between the self and the other, the normal and the freakish, the abled and disabled (among other things). But for however problematic it may be, the heyday of the side show remains one of the few periods in American popular culture where “othered” bodies were widely represented on public stages.
This course seeks to investigate the representation of disability and bodily otherness in dramatic literature. We will read a variety of plays featuring characters with disabilities, ranging from Shakespeare’s Richard III to more contemporary works such as Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. In addition to plays, we will also study the genre of side show “freak” performance in the late 19th century and contemporary iterations of side show performances, such as performance art cabarets by Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz or the Jim Rose Circus. In close reading these texts and performances, we will consider the following questions: How do we narrate disability? How we articulate otherness in a script? How, too, does staging construct and model reactions to and interactions with disabled bodies? How have historical representations of disability changed and how are these changes reflected in dramatic literature?
Performing Freakishness: Reading the Extraordinary Body Onstage
“I would prefer it where no one stared at me.” –Merrick, The Elephant Man
John Merrick, better known as The Elephant Man, spent most of his adult life on display as a “freak” attraction throughout Europe in the late 19th century. During the same time period, Chang & Eng Bunker, General Tom Thumb, and Zip the What-Is-It? were working on the American side show circuit, making a profit (and usually enabling others to profit from) the performance of their bodily differences. The freak show as a performance genre coalesces a number of complex relationships between the self and the other, the normal and the freakish, the abled and disabled (among other things). But for however problematic it may be, the heyday of the side show remains one of the few periods in American popular culture where “othered” bodies were widely represented on public stages.
This course seeks to investigate the representation of disability and bodily otherness in dramatic literature. We will read a variety of plays featuring characters with disabilities, ranging from Shakespeare’s Richard III to more contemporary works such as Suzan-Lori Parks’s Venus. In addition to plays, we will also study the genre of side show “freak” performance in the late 19th century and contemporary iterations of side show performances, such as performance art cabarets by Mat Fraser and Julie Atlas Muz or the Jim Rose Circus. In close reading these texts and performances, we will consider the following questions: How do we narrate disability? How we articulate otherness in a script? How, too, does staging construct and model reactions to and interactions with disabled bodies? How have historical representations of disability changed and how are these changes reflected in dramatic literature?
| costa_english_244a_winter2013_syllabus.doc |
English 281A: Intermediate Expository Writing
"Writing About Performance"
Writing is a performance. That is: it is not an innate skill, but a craft that can be learned, studied, practiced, and adapted to elicit different responses from audiences. English 281 is an Intermediate Writing Course intended to further develop students’ composition skills with the goal of improving the performance of writing. In this class, we will hone our skills in genre analysis, audience awareness, tone, argumentation, and research by studying performances and writing about them. We will read about and watch various types of performances (live ones in Seattle theatres, recorded in film and television, and spontaneously in the world around us), and contemplate, interpret, analyze, and evaluate their merits as works or art (or entertainment) as well as how they are crafted to critique and comment on American culture.
Assignments include 3 short papers (3 – 4 pages each) in various genres, as well as a scholarly essay (7 – 9 pages) about performance(s) of your choice. What you choose to write about is up to you, but you will be required to attend at least 2 live performances during the course of the quarter. (At the end of your syllabus, you’ll find a calendar of shows in Seattle with various price points and student ticket options.) Several shorter “writing challenges” will also be required. These challenges are informal exercises that will help you develop specific skills that will make you a stronger writer. As this is a class concerned with the performance of writing (and writing about performance), we will also incorporate some theatrical exercises designed to help you improve the clarity of your writing for audiences.
"Writing About Performance"
Writing is a performance. That is: it is not an innate skill, but a craft that can be learned, studied, practiced, and adapted to elicit different responses from audiences. English 281 is an Intermediate Writing Course intended to further develop students’ composition skills with the goal of improving the performance of writing. In this class, we will hone our skills in genre analysis, audience awareness, tone, argumentation, and research by studying performances and writing about them. We will read about and watch various types of performances (live ones in Seattle theatres, recorded in film and television, and spontaneously in the world around us), and contemplate, interpret, analyze, and evaluate their merits as works or art (or entertainment) as well as how they are crafted to critique and comment on American culture.
Assignments include 3 short papers (3 – 4 pages each) in various genres, as well as a scholarly essay (7 – 9 pages) about performance(s) of your choice. What you choose to write about is up to you, but you will be required to attend at least 2 live performances during the course of the quarter. (At the end of your syllabus, you’ll find a calendar of shows in Seattle with various price points and student ticket options.) Several shorter “writing challenges” will also be required. These challenges are informal exercises that will help you develop specific skills that will make you a stronger writer. As this is a class concerned with the performance of writing (and writing about performance), we will also incorporate some theatrical exercises designed to help you improve the clarity of your writing for audiences.
| syllabus_costa_english_281a_spring14.docx |
