Spring offers the excitement of defrosting from Winter Quarter and the joy of new beginnings, especially for those graduating in June. Tabitha Jou Yi is a MAWRD student who is experiencing just that.
Tabitha is currently a full-time high school English teacher who started the MAWRD Program in 2023. After completing her undergraduate degree, Tabitha began her secondary education career after a short break to pursue music. She has since had a primary focus of teaching English Literature classes, and she had her first taste of rhetoric in teaching AP Language and Composition. Additionally, she was seeking an endorsement in teaching dual credit English, which allows high school students to simultaneously gain college and grade school credits, and that ultimately led her to begin to MAWRD program.
Her introduction to Writing, Rhetoric and Discourse was through WRD 500 Proseminar with Dr. Monica Reyesand WRD 505 Contemporary Rhetorics with Dr. Jason Kalin.
“I was feeling pretty new to it, despite having done my undergrad in English Lit, but I felt really welcome and brought up to speed. Proseminar in particular was really helpful in giving me the overview and the landscape of what rhetoric is. Contemporary Rhetorics was just an amazing class in general,” Tabitha shared.
Tabitha found the MAWRD program especially helpful in finding a more specific toolkit to promote change as a public educator.
“Theres a lot of real-world applications, in ways to read the world, engage with what’s happening and hopefully use the power of words and symbols to make a change. That’s my goal and philosophy as a public educator, not to brainwash, but to encourage empathy and conversation and the ability to see from multiple perspectives and agree to disagree in a respectful manner… and it aligns with what I want to do in public education.”
During her second to last quarter this past winter, Tabitha conducted an Independent Study where her primary goal was to build a potential curriculum to use in her own classroom. Through reading and learning content from Dr. Schneider’s Writing about Rights course, she was able to adapt and research texts for her potential unit. Her overall goal was to create lesson plans around two important questions: What is justice? Is American society just? She was inspired by texts like Being Heumann: The Unrepentant Memoir of a Disability Rights Activist by Judith Heumann as it is a memoir, Tabitha describes, about “a community we don’t often hear or talk about in the classroom.”
In addition to continuing in the public education space post-graduation, Tabitha is interested in seeking to join a technology specialist and endorsement program in the fall to potentially become an instructional technology specialist. In marrying her newfound WRD expertise with technology, Tabitha aspires to “use technology to better develop curriculum and better support students and teachers in their learning.”
MAWRD is honored to prepare the next generation of great educators. Tabitha Jou Yi is just one example of exceptional students within the program. To continue to stay up to date with other students in the program, visit Student Spotlights here on the WRD blog.