I lead and participate in a number of Service and Outreach activities through Auburn University and in the community.

I believe most learning happens outside of the classroom. I am interested in high impact educational practices--projects and experiences that fundamentally change the way you view yourself and understand the world you inhabit. In addition to organizing a Study Abroad Program in Greece, I am committed to providing high impact opportunities for students here on campus. Not only do such projects offer students unique opportunities to interact with each other in structured, meaningful ways, they also satisfy my desire for intensely creative and collaborative high stakes events. I value these opportunities because having them when I was a student changed my life for the better. My goal in designing "out-of-the-box programs" is to offer students similar opportunities. These experiences have led to the most profound encounters and experiences I have had as a faculty member.

In this short video, I describe my Service Philosophy and offer examples of the service & outreach I perform.

Service:

My academic service can be summarized in two categories: Institutional and Pedagogical.

Institutional:

I serve the English Department on the Undergraduate Studies Committee and as a Teaching Circle Leader. (A Teaching Circle is a group of faculty & GTAs with limited membership who meet on an ongoing basis to discuss issues of teaching and learning.)

Pedagogical:

My commitments to Active Learning and Constructivist Learning are reflected in the opportunities I create every semester for my students to engage meaningfully and collaboratively with the learning we do inside the class. For example, when I teach poetry workshops, I organize, promote, and facilitate student readings and require students to attend at least 3 outside creative writing events during the semester. When I teach playwriting, I create opportunities for students to have their plays performed. I integrate service opportunities into my Literature courses, for example, the Random Acts of Kindness project. Although my core students in Comp and Lit are not English majors, I invite them to participate in the events I organize and I design assignments that emphasize integrative interdisciplinary learning.

Upcoming Events:

FairytaleFlash: 24 Hour Playwriting Festival, Spring 2016

FrankenFlash: 24 Hour Playwriting Festival, Spring 2016

WTF? (What The Frankenstein?): Interdisciplinary collaboration between creative writing & physics students, Spring / Fall 2016

Outreach:

As Region 2 Coordinator of the Poetry Out Loud program in the state of Alabama, I visit high schools near and far to lead workshops in poetry recitation, organize yearly events the Regional Competition & Finding Your Voice Workshop, promote and advertise the program through social media, and perform numerous other administrative tasks.

As co-creator of the Writing & Rhyming, I used a CCE (Community & Civic Engagement) Grant to initiate a bi-weekly poetry work workshop open to all residents in the Auburn community in cooperation with the Auburn Public Library.