2020 – pres. (tenure-track [TT] appointment)
2018 – 20 (non-tenure-track [NTT] appointment)
My teaching does not exist independently of my research and service. I use it as an opportunity to present knowledge-building as fundamentally relational, communal, equitable, and transformative and composition as an activity of cognition and metacognition that mediates the armature of knowledge-making, from thought and emotion to craft-based decisions to collaboration. Best described as decolonizing and restorative, my diasporic-disabled pedagogy unsettles monolithic, monocultural, Eurocentric knowledge paradigms through course design and instruction that recenter alternative ways of knowing and critical reflexivity. In foregrounding care, my pedagogy ameliorates inequitable, exclusionary practices like punitive attendance policies, inflexible deadlines, costly required materials, and the presumption that "real" learning is evidenced by visible presence, eye contact, vocal participation, and linear advancement. In my experience, these pedagogies transform the composition classroom — a site of power, privilege, hierarchy, and agonism that conflates quality with perfection — into an anti-oppressive, community-oriented writing ecology, empowering students to transfer preexisting knowledges and advocate for and concentrate on their individualized learning. My goal is to divest from prevailing notions of content mastery and heuristics of intelligence to create safe, socially just learning communities where students can habituate the textual sensibilities and information and media literacies necessary to become rhetorically knowledgeable, critically conscious communicators across genres and disciplines.
My pedagogical approach is informed by (1) Tamil literacy frameworks, which construct composition as a social, aesthetic activity of cognition and metacognition embedded in the embodied, situational, and environmental resources and contingencies that shape knowledge-making; and (2) principles of disability justice that challenge academia's deficit models surrounding student writing, student-faculty relationships, and writing assessment. Given the linguistic vectors of anti-Tamil oppression in Sri Lanka's ethnic conflict, I naturally advance linguistic justice in all of my classes, promoting code-meshing, or the integration of multiple languages and semiotic systems in writing. Additionally, my classroom activities and assignments are designed to help students map their writing ecologies, enabling them to perceive and strategically harness environmental and material influences while composing. Rasa aesthetics — the classical Indian analogue to the European rhetorical tradition — emphasizes the importance of evocative, immersive texts that demand active engagement from writers and audiences. Aesthetic experiences activate neural circuits that generate both universal and particular states of consciousness, using multiple forms of sensory expression to evoke sympathetic resonance between self and audience; thus, composing within a rasa-informed framework results in "present" students (regardless of course delivery mode) and compelling writing (regardless of discipline or genre).
My writing pedagogy absorbs this ethos, recovering the intersubjective, performative, and affective qualities innate to all texts in the context of deep embodiment pedagogy: a complementary Euro-Western approach that focuses on affect, embodiment, and the generation and experience of critical wonder. Deep embodiment pedagogy explicitly maps for students how to arrive at and exploit complete sensory immersion in and attunement with the writing process, inhabiting embodied emotions through "an intimate relation to words as well as through a bodily based performance of those words." When composing in a state of deep embodiment, students become acutely aware of their bodily sensations, movements, and physical feedback from the activity and in turn become better equipped to harness those responses in their writing. Furthermore, the strong, potentially stymying feelings that are often produced in states of deep embodiment are productive sites for invention, meaning-making, and drafting. In normalizing aesthetic approaches and the experience of discomfort, struggle, and labor frequently required to produce the written word, a rasa-informed deep embodiment pedagogy teaches students that their composing bodies are active instruments that learn and write by interrogating and collaborating with other bodies.
Since I joined Pace, the impact of my educational practices has been recognized with the April 2019 Faculty of the Month Award, the 2020 Honoring Excellence Faculty Award for Supporting Academic Achievement Award, and the 2021 LGBTQA+ Educator of the Year Award, which I was nominated for twice. I have outlined exemplary pedagogical practices below.
Resilient, Responsive, Relational Framework. I build care work, accessibility, and community — core commitments of decolonization and disability justice — into every aspect of my instruction, listening to my students about local conditions of exclusion and inequity. All of my courses are Low/No Cost to avoid financially burdening students from under-resourced backgrounds. I make all of the assignments available in Week 1 so students know what to expect and can pace themselves as needed. I teach "method" lessons to ensure students understand both what they are learning and how to accomplish their writing tasks. I routinely reassess student needs through periodic surveys and recalibrate my goals accordingly, balancing my students' self-reported learning preferences and desires with my own course objectives. I design slide decks that are accessible, informal, and approachable to reduce feelings of anxiety or incompetence, including a time-checked agenda to communicate stable organizational expectations. I also use compassionate course policies, including a "no-questions-asked" predetermined grace period for late work and a forgiving attendance policy predicated on cross-modality participation instead of passive presence.
"Living" Syllabi. I create community-first syllabi that emphasize relational knowledge building, rewarding difference instead of punishing it and lessening the burden of resilience and meritocracy placed on students by institutional discourse. Using constructive course evaluation comments, I have variously formatted my syllabi to reduce access friction for students, including: PDFs with tooltips (displaying definitions or examples), embedded links (pointing to course materials and external resources); visual guides; websites; Google Doc syllabi that students annotate with thoughts and questions; and an online "course book" that can be bookmarked and accessed on any device.
Collaborative, Process-Oriented Writing. Instead of composing in isolation, siloed in their disciplines, students write collaboratively through peer review, team activities, instructor conferences (which I call "coffee chats" to stress their informality), and shared reflective writing. I assign low-stakes writing (to learn through writing) and high-stakes writing (to demonstrate learning in writing) in all my courses, along with multiple, ungraded drafts of formal projects. I provide dialogic feedback in one-on-one coffee chats (synchronously or asynchronously, as course delivery mode dictates) to encourage students to actively participate in revision. I use process-oriented writing to lower the stakes of drafting, using emoji "reactions" instead of grades to informally signal what the draft is evoking. Moreover, to avoid overwhelming students while increasing their agency over their writing decisions, I provide general feedback sheets — a bulleted list of substantive higher-order concerns (like fulfilling objectives, articulating a critical perspective, and integrating and synthesizing sources) — that require them to reread and rewrite in an iterative process.
Experiential Learning. I create experiential learning opportunities for students to engage in direct observation and field research, including: cyberethnographies of Reddit in core writing courses; the creation of a partial, multimodal campus access guide in LIT 275: Disability Studies in Literature and Culture; social, collaborative reading and annotation in ENG 214: Introduction to Rhetorical History and Theory; body mapping and other contemplative practices in ENG 322: The Art of Memoir; multimodal genre analyses enacting the genre conventions at hand in LIT 315A: Postmodern Literature; and access audits and makerspace projects in WS 297v: Feminist Disability Justice.
Contemplative Practices. Students expect traditional academic writing to be detached, disembodied, formulaic, and emotionless; when intellectual and emotional learning are overtly connected, they are better able to deeply engage with both composition theory and practice. Furthermore, attending to bodily rhythms and responses while writing in multimodal formats makes space for the body's role in knowledge building. I engage the specific student bodies that occupy my classrooms by drawing on my diasporic spiritual traditions, incorporating accessible contemplative practices, like adaptive yoga sessions, mudras (finger poses), acupressure point stimulation, meditation, breathwork, and body mapping.
Creation and Analysis of Epistemic Artifacts. I use artifact design and analysis to help students develop a metacognitive understanding of writing processes, scaffold and cross-check student learning, and recenter craft in writing instruction. Students engage in DIY culture in the form of multimodal projects, reflect on how they develop an artifact and use it as a case study. I also provide students with the option of a self-designed meaningful writing project, in alignment with established principles of effective assignment design.
Games and Gamification. To actively involve students in enacting writing studies concepts, I have used TTRPG games modified for the classroom, including: Dialect in core writing courses to portray discourse community formation; and 1,000 Blank White Cards — a game that lacks definitions, rules, and even fixed materials — in LIT 315A: Postmodern Literature to depict postmodern contingency. I have used interactive livestreams of The Westport Independent in ENG 206: Introduction to Writing Studies and core writing courses to simulate rhetorical choices in censorship. I redesigned LIT 205: Introduction to Literature, Media, and Culture to revolve around playing and analyzing video games, from the interactive fiction Galatea to the roguelike Hades. Playing games together fosters community and offers students an embodied, relational context for theory and multimodal composition.
I possess extensive experience with technology in the writing classroom, which has prepared me to support my students through sickness, loss, trauma, and financial strain — along with online learning — since the pandemic began. My use of computers in the composition classroom (along with my scholarship and service in digital rhetoric) has been recognized with the 2023 Technology Innovator Award, given by the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee on Computers in Composition and Communication. I have outlined the exemplary ways I teach with technology below.
Digital Multimodal Composition. I have used various technologies over the years to highlight that writing is a relational ecology with outputs meant for diverse audiences, including: makerspace technologies (3D printing, textiles, sculptures), Scalar (media-rich online publisher), Hypothesis (annotation tool for social reading), Flipgrid (video clip responses), Wordpress (blog carnivals), Twine (interactive fiction tool), Bitsy (8-bit game creator), Slack (text-based communication), Jamboard (anonymous whiteboard), and Discord (social media). In my courses, students have digitally remixed traditional scholarship, participated in blog carnivals — a collection of short posts on a single topic — and composed multimodal, interactive essays. In addition to traditional essays, I accept projects that make innovative use of technology, such as Google Sites, interactive Twine essays, video essays, and "found" essays collaging social media posts.
Discord. After experimenting with Zoom and Slack, I shifted my online courses to Discord, a free platform that reduces dataveillance, promotes nonhierarchical participation and collaboration, and reconstructs the classroom as a social, communal, and restorative space in keeping with my pedagogical orientations. With its preference for persistent text-based communication and inclusion of audiovisual channels, Discord preemptively accommodates a diverse range of bodyminds by expanding the available modalities for synchronous and asynchronous low-stakes, low-fatigue student participation. On Discord, I mandate the use of pseudonyms and avatars to minimize student anxiety about class participation, hoping to undo years of socialization in higher education in which the classroom is frequently construed as a site where expertise must be performed rather than gained—naturalizing a transactional, adversarial relationship between instructors and students.
"After Hours" (Extracurricular) Engagement. My online classroom community spaces engage students "after hours." During and outside class time, students can informally communicate with me and each other in text and voice channels (with or without video), supplemented with emojis, GIFs, or memes, enhancing student participation and permitting asynchronous participation for students in crisis. Discord's voice channels additionally lend themselves to student-driven reading, writing, and workshop sessions.
In all of my classes, I cultivate socially just forms of assessment — those that do not inherently and unintentionally privilege some students over others — within a responsive course architecture that allows me to improvise as student needs dictate. The dynamic, community-first holistic assessment I use innovates on the labor-based grading (LBG) system popularly accepted in writing studies, described by Inoue as a collaboratively agreed-upon assessment method that reconfigures grading as an equitable practice through anti-racist, linguistically just lenses. Conventional grading is a poor measure of learning, as it is determined by Eurocentric, middle-class values and incentivizes students to focus solely on earning grades; by contrast, "a good assessment ecology, one that is socially just in every way, should be self-consciously designed to meet the principles of universal design" and explicitly indicate to students the value of "the work done in and for a course, that is, the bodily work of reading, writing, and other activities associated with what it takes to engage in a writing course." By definition, LBG refocuses students on exploration, experimentation, and creative-critical thinking in writing and allows for idiosyncratic modifications that better align with my diasporic-disabled pedagogical framework. However, as Carillo observes, this model of LBG risks being exclusionary in its conflation of student ability to labor (measurable through timely work output) with student willingness to labor (a variable whose quantifiability demands disclosure of personal circumstance), ultimately enforcing Eurocentric, middle-class, ableist, and neurotypical conceptions of labor and perpetuating structural injustices on nonnormative students.
Accordingly, I have worked to recontour LBG into a holistic assessment that accounts for intersectionality — including disability, gender, nationality, and immigration status — in addition to race, language, and class, to avoid unintentionally reifying normative grading and penalizing students who are willing to labor but are prevented from consistently, linearly doing so due to their environmental and material circumstances. I explicitly normalize anomalous embodiment and legitimize multiple ways of knowing and being in my course architecture and policies. I ask students to identify their preferred modes of participation by Week 2 to informally establish a list of alternatives to oral participation. In online classes, I never require students to use their cameras (though I use mine) to minimize student anxiety and bandwidth use. I also consider spoken contributions, public text chats, semi-private team chats, direct messages to me, emoji reactions, and more to be legitimate methods of participation; equating attendance with participation — while simultaneously relaxing the restrictions on what legitimate participation is — facilitates increased student engagement. Students are assessed based on their individualized participation and writing processes, which are measurable across low-stakes writing, high-stakes drafts, and reflective “writing about writing” exercises that clarify students’ metacognitive writing processes.
From 2018-20, my NTT teaching responsibilities consisted of 12 credits per semester; since 2020, I have received 3 credits of release time per semester as the Pleasantville WEC program director. Since I was appointed to a TT role in 2023, I have received an additional 3 credits of release time for scholarly development. I have significantly revised and taught 11 distinct undergraduate courses across multiple modalities. In core writing, I have taught Critical Writing (ENG 120) and Writing in the Disciplines (ENG 201). I have significantly revised and taught Introduction to Literature, Culture, and Media (LIT 205), Introduction to Writing Studies (ENG 206), Introduction to Rhetorical History and Theory (ENG 214), Introduction to Disability Studies in Literature and Culture (LIT 275), The Art of Memoir (ENG 322A), and Postmodern Literature (LIT 315A). I also created, developed, and taught Feminist Disability Justice (WS 297V), now one of four required Women's and Gender Studies major electives for combined degree candidates. I obtained Writing-Enhanced attributes for LIT 205, LIT 275, ENG 206, ENG 214, LIT 275, LIT 315A, and WS 297V, as well as Anti-Racist Education attributes for LIT 275 and ENG 322A. I also taught LIT 275 as a Civic Engagement course, culminating in a project where student teams conducted access audits of four student-selected locations on Pleasantville campus.
In addition to my contractual teaching obligations, I regularly mentor current and former students, including: sponsoring a student's research on restorative justice in syllabus design for the Society of Fellows (SoF); informally advising students on selecting a major, applying to graduate school, and querying literary agents; and helping a student develop independent scholarship for an undergraduate publication in the field.
My course evaluations for the past five years have been consistently high, with a mean score of 4.05 (including low outliers). My numerical scores also show an arc of improvement across iterations of a course. Furthermore, many students have praised aspects of my instruction, including my knowledgeability, clarity, organization, provision of technical documentation, and use of social platforms to foster learning community. Unsolicited student emails I have received over the years also attest to this. When constructive criticisms are offered, I use them to refine my materials and pedagogical approach. Complete student evaluations can be found in the Course Evaluations (2020-25) appendix.
In keeping with my diasporic-disabled frameworks and decolonizing, restorative approaches, it is important to note that course evaluations are poor metrics of student learning and instructor performance, especially for minority faculty. Heffernan's recent synthesis of contemporary research on course evaluations concludes that student evaluators are influenced by racist, ableist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic prejudices, as well as by their feelings about the discipline and subject area of the course. Evaluations are also significantly biased based on the demographics of the students completing them. BIPOC women and visibly queer, disabled, and trans and/or gender-nonconforming scholars receive the highest (and most offensive) volume of preemptive retaliatory low ratings and abusive comments, which are often of a personal nature. In short, course evaluations tend to reflect grade-related stress and the instructor's positionality rather than the effectiveness of instruction.
This information is provided here to contextualize identity-based and disciplinary biases on my course evaluations as outliers rather than general trends. For instance, in my lowest set of student evaluation scores in an asynchronous ENG 201 course in Spring 2025, the comments misrepresent course policies, materials, and instructor communications and criticize my identity, personality, and refusal to reward a lack of participation, reflecting how they feel about their experience, not what they needed to learn or how I attempted to teach them. Other outliers across the courses I have taught target my ethnicity, disability, institutional requirements I do not control, and my use of Discord (without acknowledging if they utilized the onboarding materials or coffee chats to overcome any difficulties or that I accept and facilitate alternative platforms for participation). Finally, low response rates on course evaluations yield data at either extreme, with emotion-based comments from students who loved the course and students who hated it, with little to no relevance to course instruction. Students are not appropriately positioned to evaluate pedagogical approaches; despite this, student evaluation data aids in gauging course quality and instructional performance and making hiring, firing, and tenure and promotion decisions. This subjects marginalized faculty — the same groups that universities claim to value and support — to stress, anxiety, and emotional damage from exposure to racist, ableist, sexist, queerphobic, and/or sexually inappropriate comments.
Comparatively, peer evaluations and expert reviews are more reliable indicators of instructional performance. On my faculty annual reviews, I am consistently ranked highly (4-5). In peer observations, I have consistently received a mean score of 4 (Exceeds Expectations) since joining Pace in 2018. For complete observation documents, please refer to the "Peer Observations" appendix. Please note that I was not observed in 2022-23, was observed twice in 2023-24, and was observed by a faculty member outside of my department in 2024-25.
I will continue refining my instructional practice to create broadly literate students who are actively involved in shaping the conditions of their learning. At present, I am refining my holistic assessment schema to account for the impacts of the pandemic, climate crises, institutional oppression, and political destabilization on student learning, with the aim of reducing students' stress, increasing their intrinsic motivation, and retraining their attention on learning. Based on my observation of student behaviors, interactions, and stressors in my own classrooms — in addition to constructive student feedback — I have begun the process of integrating components of a critical university studies curriculum into all of my courses to improve accessibility, information and media literacy, and knowledge transfer. I am also refining pedagogical resources regarding classroom accessibility, literacies, and disciplinary writing across content specialization with this in mind as well. Overall, I will continue to strive to present teaching as an equalizing, inclusive, and accessible space for critical thought, creativity, interaction, and alternative ways of being and knowing.