I have been teaching at Broward College, first as an adjunct and then as a professor, since 2003. I grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Penn State University where I majored in English and American Studies. I completed my Ph. D. at Florida Atlantic University where I studied US fiction and Urban history. I have written articles and presented papers on a variety of topics including: Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, Joyce Carol Oates, and the rapper Eminem. I am a firm believer in the benefits of online education because it is a place where students may feel safer when asking questions and exploring their interests. Questioning, of course, being one of the most important parts of learning: Writing is the other. You don't know what you know until you write about it. Education, in all forms and for all classes, is about overcoming the oppression of ignorance and empowering yourself to create new knowledge. If all we do is repeat what someone else tells us -- either in math, science, English, or speech -- we never actually learn anything, staying bound to the oppression of ignorance. Learning is about taking old information and changing it into new information and you already have many of the tools needed to do that. I find that the difficulty students have in actualizing their own liberation is primarily due to one of two things: they're scared of what they know and their scared of what they don't know. The process of education and the process of liberation requires work! It's fear that keeps students from wanting to work for their education. The classroom and online environment, then, become places where students can engage with familiar technology, familiar literacies (ways of communicating), and familiar ideas in order to create a "safe place" for learning to occur.
