Hi! I’m Dan. When I teach, I want to promote equity and retention by engaging my First-year students in their own active learning, and guiding them to empower themselves when they learn to transfer the critical literacy habits we practice in my class to other parts of their lives. I want my students to leave my class questioning everything about their roles in larger systems, to advocate for their experience and their rights within those systems, and to make positive impacts on those systems.

I have developed this philosophy and practice over the last four years at SF State University, teaching in the First Year Writing Program. I come with a background in Critical Race Theories of student resistance and critical pedagogies from the M.A. in Education, Equity and Social Justice Program at SFSU, which enriched my subsequent development in the English Composition M.A. Program here. Over the past four years, I have worked to become a full-time Lecturer, specializing in professional development of curricular innovations for social justice and active learning, which means I led a few faculty workshops and conference presentations to share my work and that of my co-innovators. This work includes professional development using a “Marginal Syllabus”; incorporating ‘Students’ Right to their Own Language’ and Integrated Reading and Writing (IRW) principles into student learning and projects; developing First Year Experience projects that involve active learning strategies; innovating new approaches to antiracist contract grading “ecologies” (building on Inoue 2015); and helping revive the Experimental College (ExCo) program at SFSU to give students the incredible opportunity to teach other students.

My CV is continually updated HERE.

*header image credit: rampages.us