Jessica Zinz-Cheresnick

Jessica Zinz-Cheresnick is a Teaching Professor at BGSU and affiliate faculty member of the Creative Writing Program. She has served as Director of Creative Writing Undergraduate Studies and Associate Director in the University Writing Program. Jessica grew up in Meadville, PA. She holds a B.A. from Allegheny College and an M.F.A from Bowling Green State University. She teaches WRIT courses for The University Writing Program and creative writing courses for the Creative Writing Program. She has published art, poetry, and hybrid poetry, most recently in Tab Journal, RHINO Magazine, Harpy Hybrid Review, and The Art Students League of New York. She has work forthcoming in Driftwood. With a background in mixed media arts and creative writing, she practices and is interested in hybrid creative writing forms and visual poetry. Word and image collage, found poetry and arts, and comic-style hybrid work have been more recent focuses of her work. 

STATEMENT OF TEACHING APPROACH

While teaching at the university level, I have adapted several principles and values for my own philosophy of teaching. I work to create a welcoming learning environment, encourage continual progress in all students, and create and offer engaged teaching.  

With recent world changes and gained knowledge, I also approach teaching with empathy, compassion, and anti-racist teaching and assessment methods. Awareness of the inequities that exist in the environment of higher education has allowed me to consider relevant course content, discussion, and assessment. Understanding my role and responsibilities as an educator, I work to gain a better understanding of systemic racism in order to guide my students. I encourage media literacy, lead discussions of social justice, offer anti-racism resources, promote and encourage diversity in the texts provided for class, and I look for innovative ways to amplify all voices in the classroom, regardless of race, religion, sex, gender, ability, or any differences.  

I appreciate the value of a fully engaged instructor and strive to offer this to my students. In order to do so, I have taken on a teaching approach that emphasizes the creative process and mindfulness.

Through creative contemplative pedagogy, I hope to engage with the students in a way that will illuminate them, give them a flash of insight that they can work to hold on to and contemplate. Arthur Zajonc notes that contemplative pedagogy “offers to its partitions a wide range of educational methods that support the development of student attention, emotional balance, empathetic connection, compassion, and altruistic behavior, while also providing new pedagogical techniques that support creativity and the learning of course content” (83). I want my students to bring their whole-selves to their writing, not just their intellectual selves. I want them to understand that learning and discovery can come to any student, just as it would an artist.

By adapting the principles that make compassion, understanding, reflection, engagement, and art-based learning so powerful, and offering myself as an engaged writer that guides the classroom, I hope to teach students the individual lessons associated with the learning goals of the classroom. However, I also hope to teach them some of the most powerful lessons in a classroom, that writing is not isolated to the classroom and often only begins there, that writing is an art and a way of life, that writing should not be the burden of getting the work complete, that, instead, it should be the art and skill of producing the work, the challenge and reward of discovery, the gained knowledge through written communication.

Zajonc, Arthur. “Contemplative Pedagogy: A Quiet Revolution in Higher Education.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, vol. 2013, no 134, 2013, pp. 83-94. doi:10.1002/tl.20057.  

Through creative contemplative pedagogy, I hope to engage with the students in a way that will illuminate them, give them a flash of insight that they can work to hold on to and contemplate. Arthur Zajonc notes that contemplative pedagogy “offers to its partitions a wide range of educational methods that support the development of student attention, emotional balance, empathetic connection, compassion, and altruistic behavior, while also providing new pedagogical techniques that support creativity and the learning of course content” (83). I want my students to bring their whole-selves to their writing, not just their intellectual selves. I want them to understand that learning and discovery can come to any student, just as it would an artist.

By adapting the principles that make compassion, understanding, reflection, engagement, and art-based learning so powerful, and offering myself as an engaged writer that guides the classroom, I hope to teach students the individual lessons associated with the learning goals of the classroom. However, I also hope to teach them some of the most powerful lessons in a classroom, that writing is not isolated to the classroom and often only begins there, that writing is an art and a way of life, that writing should not be the burden of getting the work complete, that, instead, it should be the art and skill of producing the work, the challenge and reward of discovery, the gained knowledge through written communication.

Zajonc, Arthur. “Contemplative Pedagogy: A Quiet Revolution in Higher Education.” New Directions for Teaching and Learning, vol. 2013, no 134, 2013, pp. 83-94. doi:10.1002/tl.20057.