About the Writer

Tania Cepero Lopez
Associate Teaching Professor of Writing & Rhetoric
Department of English 
Florida International University

Email: tlopez@fiu.edu
Direct line: ‭(305) 348-3325‬


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When Students Speak

Image
Photo by  Jason Rosewell  on  Unsplash Over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about your (student) feedback, and how it's affected me personally, and my teaching over the last decade or so. I have, let's say, mixed feelings about your feedback, ranging from anger to anxiety to guilt to shame to...well, you get it.  Mixed, strong feelings about your feedback. For sure. When I started teaching in 2006, the end-of-semester student evaluations mainly triggered feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. I vividly recall one student who confidently claimed that I favored Hispanic students or something to that effect. I went into total panic mode when I read that comment. I remember I emailed my program's director asking her if she thought I should send a mass email to the entire class explaining how this was not true, and how much I appreciated and valued every single student, not just those who shared my Hispanic heritage. I had taken, I told her, special care to never use ...
Read more

Notes on Literacy Narratives

Image
    This week, we are starting the literacy narrative project , and as you start exploring the path you wish to take I'm thinking there's a few things I could share with you to make your journey more enjoyable.  There are many ways to write a literacy narrative, and these are just a few of them: Memories O ne easy way to think about writing a literacy narrative is to create an inventory of moments or memories that you feel are relevant to the story you are trying to tell. If I were to write a story about how I learned to parent kids on the Autism Spectrum, I might spend a few minutes writing a list of important moments I'd like to share with my readers. The first one would probably be the day I was told they were on the spectrum. As a student suggested in class recently, I could open my narrative with a description of the room we were in, what I saw, heard, what I was feeling, etc. and go from there. In this case, vivid description will be a tool you can use to creat...
Read more

Letter to a Young Blogger

Image
Dear Young Writers,  I'm writing from Strum Hall at the University of Denver, after a day of attending lots of cool--or at least cool to me--presentations on how to create community writing projects that are reciprocal, meaningful, and promote a better, more just world.  View of University of Denver campus from Strum Hall (my photo) In between sessions, I started reading your summaries of the articles, stories, and TedTalks you'll be writing about in your first blog posts. And I quickly realized that despite your uncanny ability to quickly and fairly summarize events in your life, movies, and TikToks, when you are asked to write a summary of an article, or a TedTalk in the context of a school assignment, your writing muscles inevitably tense up, and your writing becomes as stiff as my forty-four year old right knee. It's not your fault. You've been conditioned to do what you are told in school, and so your problem-solving skills are a bit rusty. The summary is but one p...
Read more