People

Snow Lee-Jones, PhD grew up on a sheep farm in rural Virginia, and is a 2019 graduate of Rutgers University’s doctoral program in cultural anthropology. They received their M.A. from Columbia University (Climate & Society ’10) and their B.A. from Oberlin College (English, Sociology '07). Their research concerns settler colonialism, phenomenology, and the production of settler whiteness in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada. Currently, they are an assistant teaching professor of academic and inductive research writing in Rutgers’ English Department - Writing Program and Graduate Writing Program. When not teaching or writing, they are either gardening, riding their bike, playing music and podcasts, or painstakingly critiquing comedic television writing.

• I acknowledge and honor that Rutgers University is located on the lands of the still-living, still-sovereign Lenape peoples, communities, and nation. I also acknowledge that Rutgers University was founded upon exclusions and erasure of Indigenous peoples and the exploitation of enslaved labor: https://diversity.rutgers.edu/honor-native-land

• I teach using a constructivist pedagogical approach, and center learner-directed, engaged, and a personal/faciliting style of teaching in both online and face-to-face classrooms. For students, this means the way I teach and methods I use are not lecture- or exam-based, and instead require consistent interaction between the professor (me) and the student (you) to produce the best learning outcomes, and proivde you the highest-quality possible education I can. In your lecture/exam courses, you likely have encountered what’s called a behaviorist or instructor-centered pedagogy. That means I have higher expectations for students' engagement, questioning, discussion, and intellectual exchange than in other, larger courses. The methods I use in the classroom are modelled after the classroom formats I encountered as an undergraduate at a liberal arts school, with degrees in both the humanities and social sciences. This approach centers student voices and gives them choices in their learning, so that they develop confidence in structuring and communicating their own original thinking to diverse audiences.

  I agree with philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who stated that “if we are not applying the critiques we read and produce in our scholarship and education to our own lives, to our relationships, then there is no point to education at all.” What I teach, and how I teach it, is not meant only to help students develop their thinking through writing well, or to receive fundamental training in basic college, research, and graduate writing, but to transform how they understand the self and how we all live with one another in the world. To that end, I believe it’s not vital that only my students are shaped through the classroom experience, but that my students help me grow both personally and pedagogically, as well. What this means, though, is that if a student only partially engages in the teaching process, they will only partially realize the full potential in themselves that my course design encourages.