Roseanne G. Gatto

As a teacher, I see my role as creating a space that is full of the kind of difference and tension that encourages a meaningful and rich classroom happening. As my students enter the classroom, I ask them one question. What are they burning to tell the world? The answers I receive vary drastically, but the underlying philosophy of my approach is that our students have something important to say, if only we give them the space to do so. Students spend the semester writing and publishing a book about what they are burning to tell the world. These books cross a number of genres. I encourage my students to embrace hybrid multimedia projects and research, while pushing them to take seriously academic forms they find daunting. I want them to explore their mother tongues critically, to celebrate their home discourses and dialects without romanticizing them. And I need them to critique and rethink their understanding of academic discourse—not to fetishize academic dialects, but rather to explore them as equally viable sites for imaginative thinking and political agency. The bottom line is that I want my students to approach a variety of discourse communities—whether local or academic, vernacular or research—from their own situated experiences, to think imaginatively and critically about traditional and hybrid forms and media.