Mr. Tyrell Collins

The interdisciplinary fields of English and Creative Writing have made me appreciate the true gift of teaching in English academia. I thoroughly enjoy teaching and have been afforded wonderful opportunities to showcase a plethora of work and impact student lives in multiple writing discourses. Teaching provides me with an inner satisfaction to broaden student awareness to cultural, political, civil, and host of perspectives to learn and gain new knowledge from.
I observed quite a bit when I was a teaching assistant from how to handle lesson plans, to time management, to dealing with multiple student dynamics. Mostly, how to organize and present information to an auditorium size classroom through media lectures which has had a major impact in how I utilize technology in the classroom.
At a previous institution I taught Writing and Rhetoric I and II. Both of these courses allowed me to instruct students on how to explore the affordances of writing in a variety of genres, medias, platforms, and technologies using key concepts. It also allotted for helping students navigate primary and secondary sources, library archival's, and other forms of written and digital media. This experience ultimately prepared me for my time at my current place of employment.
Teaching Support for English Composition, English Composition I and II has provided me great joy helping scholars learn how they construct meaning through multicultural text and produce quality writing, including honing in on skills such as note-taking, and various aspects of English grammar. English academia has continues to be a true passion that I want to continue to teach in.
In the future, I would love to expand my knowledge in the teaching field into creative writing courses such as fundamentals, genre writing, and multi-modality for creative purposes. As a teacher, I want to advance the critical thinking and creative development of my students to the best of my abilities, so they come out of my courses feeling like they have done their best and do not see writing as horrendous process. I am upmost confident that my past teaching experiences, quality academic background, and communication skills coupled with thorough and creative preparation will continue to make me a great teacher to learn from.

My areas of research interest have always been in Black and Multicultural Literature. In my undergraduate experience, I did extensive research and learning through African American Foundation courses. Some of those areas included: the Slave Narrative, Folklore Poetry and Music, the Antebellum Period, Voices of Tradition & Reform, and Voices of the Black Arts Movement. Of all these superb categories, “The Harlem Renaissance,” has continued to be a dominate area of study and critical framework even in my creative work. My senior seminar research focused on the psychological internal and external complexities of Mulatto women through the life and work of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand. The importance of the cultural awakening in intellect and arts of this era are vital to the pedagogy of the twentieth century African American experience that still influences contemporary talent. Moreso, how the Harlem Renaissance helped Black artist shape new definitions and outlooks regarding literature, art, politics, etc. and why contemporary artist are influenced by this era. a seminar course in African American Poetry provided me the critical and creative diaspora of African American poetry from the eightieth century to contemporary times. I have also done substantive graduate work like a research project on “Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Poetry,” detailing with the intricacies of talking about African American’s lives through cycles of nature and the importance it has on identity and a shared struggle
Specifically, I have always wanted to delve further in twentieth century novels of the Harlem Renaissance and explore how writers such as Nella Larsen, Jessie faucet, Wallace Thurman and Claude Mckay choose to address social class and gender of mulatto people compared to the contemporary novels such as Hedi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, Danzy Senna’s Caucasia, Jacqueline Woodson’s The House You Pass on the Way and Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama with research from Half and Half: Writers on Growing Up Biracial and Bicultural by Claudine Chiawei O’Hearn, What Are You?: Voices of Mixed-Race Young People by Pearl Fuyo Gaskins and many more. As a novelist and short story writer, this would allow me to combine my research background in English and Creative Writing and fuse them together .