Most of my formal teaching experience comes from working as a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) at both the University of San Francisco and the University of South Florida. Before transferring to the University of South Florida’s MFA program, I was a GTA at U of San Francisco for the course, Senior Seminar in Writing. Under the instruction of Professor Susan Steinberg, I provided written feedback on the capstone creative writing projects of college seniors. Along with leading discussions of the students’ fiction and poetry during our class’s workshop, I held biweekly individual conferences with students to discuss their work, and I curated personalized reading lists relevant to each of their projects. While my experience at U of San Francisco was vital to my growth as an educator, I transferred to the University of South Florida (USF) to pursue instructor-level teaching opportunities and formal pedagogy training. At U of San Francisco my role as a GTA was to work an aide to the professor.

While this position gave me a lot of experience working with one-on-one with undergraduate students, I started gaining instructor-level experience at USF. Now at USF, I am teaching two sections of Composition I per semester, and I am currently enrolled in a teaching practicum course for composition instructors.

     In addition to formal experience, I have a lot of informal experience with tutoring and teaching adult learners and secondary students. Recently, I spent the past year living in Seoul as a Fulbright Creative Arts grantee. Outside of my research, I volunteered as an English language tutor for North Korean defectors. While I worked with adult learners of every skill level, I particularly enjoyed working with students that have an elementary understanding of English. I tutored one student who essentially only knew the alphabet when we started, and I built a personalized curriculum to help her learn how to read in English. Before becoming a GTA, I tutored 8th-12th graders in creative and expository writing at The Learning Studios, a private tutoring company in Burlingame, California. There, I also created and taught a fifteen-week class for high schoolers called “Storytelling in Film and Fiction.” In class, I facilitated discussions of films and short stories with six students ages fifteen to seventeen. My students completed 3-5 page weekly writing assignments, read writers like John Cheever, Gish Jin, and Zadie Smith, and analyzed films directed by filmmakers like Ryan Coogler, Kathryn Bigelow, and the Coen Brothers.