Updated: December 4, 2021
Welcome! Use the table of contents to access my teaching portfolio introduction (Home section), a brief introduction about myself, and my teaching and learning statement.
Important: I reflect on my learning experiences as a writing mentor in the Teaching and Learning Goals page.
(I have also written about my journey in literacy in my Digital Literacy Narrative.)
Table of Contents
Home: Portfolio Introduction
I take pride in putting community at the forefront of anything I do.
When I arrived as a new Writing Mentor for ENG101 students, I already found that my environment at Arizona State University’s Writers’ Studio encouraged community. The coursework emphasizes that the students learn about writing by discussing with fellow writers about the new skills they are picking up and practicing. Discussion boards, peer review assignments, and even an online forum provided such opportunities.
The most successful artists work together, not alone.
So I felt it was my duty to foster the writing community by sharing my contributions, whether through fun teaching resources or providing respectful and useful feedback in revision workshops. I’ve learned how to engage the students in meaningful discussions, review their papers in the most fair and practical way possible, and ensure that I am always available for them.
My teaching portfolio highlights specific examples of how I have fulfilling my mentor responsibilities, along with the lessons I have learned from them — after all, I am both a teacher and a student. I deeply reflect my experiences being a writing mentor from which timeless principles can be extracted and applied to many areas of work. The purposes of my portfolio are to show how important it is to know how to work with others online and how to provide instruction to students in the most respectful way possible.
Anybody who works with online audiences and communities will enjoy reading my portfolio. At its most fundamental purpose, it emphasizes how I have practiced the art of having a human presence online. In this case, I interacted with students and professors online, but the art can obviously be conducted in any other online community.
Thank you for reading!
About Me
The thing I love about English is that it is a versatile discipline that can be applied to many fields.
I am developing my career in writing about travel and mental health. The mission of my blog, Mindful Meggie, is to destigmatize mental illnesses through travel. I enjoy collaborating with fellow travel writers on our projects and listening to feedback from my readers.
Many people know me as Tech70, a blue penguin who is a famous fan of a beloved online community of people who used to play Club Penguin. Our friendships have outlasted the game, which had shut down four years ago. Now, I am doing contract work as an assistant quality assurance tester, producer, and editor, under the company that founded Club Penguin, called RocketSnail. We are creating two new virtual worlds, Moose in Suits and Club Party Parrot, for all ages and the next generation of children.
In school, I am wrapping up my final year of my English BA studies as an ASU Online student living in Southern California. As of now, I am interning at ASU’s Writers’ Studio as a Writing Mentor for ENG101 courses, where community is the essential component of the students’ learning.
It is at the Writers’ Studio where I am learning to incorporate my love for community building (and writing!) into teaching practices. What is exciting about writing is that its core is the expression of ideas, and I am thrilled to help students develop a written voice in their worlds and communities.
Teaching and Learning Statement
Scribbles all over a students’ paper, lots of remarks about spelling and grammar, and long lectures about how writing should be like aren’t only a big discouragement to students. As gatekeeping tools in the academia, they hinder students’ growth in writing.
Those scribbles, remarks, and long lectures even hinder a teacher’s work as they require so much time and energy. If these limited resources are spent on everything that should be “corrected” in a student’s work, then the most important elements, such as audience awareness and the paper’s main idea, might be neglected.
I admire Peter Elbow’s approach when it comes to teaching students with comments. We must recognize that all students entering an English course have had various experiences with learning about writing. Elbow states that, “If I have to write substantive comment on student papers, I try to ensure that I can do so on the basis of some information from them about “where they are at” with this paper.” It would be wrong to assume that the students should know everything there is to know about writing in order to craft the perfect, errorless paper.
My guidance works in such a way where I would rather collaborate with the student than lecture. Everyone has something to share with the world, including my English students. I’m there to help them learn how to find their voice as a writer and craft their writing in the way that is most authentic to them, so that they can harness the communicative power of writing into as many aspects of their lives as possible.
Every piece of writing has an intention, and Richard Beach wants to ensure that his students begin by making that clear (60). Afterward, the details of the guidance can be sorted out and tailored to that very intention. The intention encompasses both the main idea of the paper as well as the intended audience. If a student’s intention is not specific enough, Beach would suggest ways to add more to that intention, based on what he knows so far about the student’s paper (60-61). It is the teacher’s job to help the student express that intention through their writing.
My interactions with students have reinforced the importance of collaboration so that we all may learn together. From here on out, speaking with others, whether that be students or creatives in a workforce team, will be a priority.
In addition, the student-teacher relationship should minimize the feeling of authority as much as possible. After all, the teacher’s job is to help the students grow as unique writers, not turn them into writers per the teacher’s wishes. The students should be proud of their work and take ownership over it, as Lil Brannon and C. H. Knoblauch claim (161). I wholeheartedly agree because their work is the result of the experiences and ideas they wish to communicate with the world. Teachers are not in the position to disqualify those experiences and ideas through authoritative teaching. As a teacher myself, I aim to communicate with the students about their work. These good conversations alone are wholesome learning experiences for both me (I learn about the student’s progress and their intentions of their written work) and the student (by speaking about their writing with someone, they may very well bring to surface new insights about the craft).
By evening out the power, everyone is respected for what they contribute to the collective community.
Important: I reflect on my learning experiences as a writing mentor in the Teaching and Learning Goals page.
(I have also written about my journey in literacy in my Digital Literacy Narrative.)
Works Cited
Beach, Richard. “Demonstrating Techniques for Assessing Writing in the Writing Conference.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 37, no. 1, National Council of Teachers of English, 1986, pp. 56–65, https://doi.org/10.2307/357382.
Brannon, Lil, and C. H. Knoblauch. “On Students’ Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 33, no. 2, National Council of Teachers of English, 1982, pp. 157–66, https://doi.org/10.2307/357623.
Elbow, Peter. “About Responding to Student Writing.”