"It feels good to be lost in the right direction." - Anonymous Quote

Where Am I Now?

I returned to the U.S. in Fall 2019 after living and working in Japanese schools for nearly a decade. Upon returning, I joined the Masters of Teaching program at Eastern Michigan University and received my degree in Winter 2022. I recently completed my student teaching in the English department at Saline High School in Saline, Michigan. I also hold a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Orleans, with a photography and digital media concentration. Please use the links above to explore my teaching portfolio in the following sections: (1) Teaching Philosophy and Examination of Praxis, (2) Units and Lesson Plans, (3) Samples of Student Work, (4) Writing Portfolio, (5) Visual Art Portfolio, and (6) Filing Cabinet (containing my resume, classes taught, and letters of recommendation). My work is presented here for review only, please do not use without consent. Also, being that I am constantly improving, reflecting and developing, this portfolio will always be a work in progress.

A Path to a U.S. Classroom

Leaving Japan meant giving up a profession that had become intimately connected to my sense of identity. As soon as I learned I would be returning home, I began searching for a path to a U.S. classroom. The transition was exciting, but there was some apprehension, too. I spent eight years working in traditional classroom settings, dominated by teacher-centered instruction. Japanese classrooms follow traditional models, with the teacher in charge of learning. I was trained to use direct instruction methods, quite different than my experiences in higher education. As I began working in Japanese secondary classrooms, I felt uncomfortable with the authority and control role. My eight years of teaching has left me with two broad understandings of teacher-centered instruction: (1) I do not believe the roles of teacher and student are equitable, and (2) students are not empowered, and they do not learn effectively by transmission of knowledge.

The MAT program at Eastern Michigan University was a reverse engineering of the Japanese teacher training, and yet, locally and across the nation, it seems teacher-centered instruction is still thriving here as well. With each course came a stream of new techniques, ideas, and perspectives about teaching, which can be both inspiring and a cacophony of buzzwords. There were times when I was reading some article on pedagogical practice and I began asking myself: So, when do I learn how to teach English? I worried that I was not ready, that I was incomplete, missing some critical component of being a “real teacher.” As I have been working in classrooms, these feelings have not disappeared, but they have changed. And I am learning that such uncertainty is perfectly natural—good teaching is a challenge precisely because it is not predictable, formulaic, the status quo.