Andrew Rose — Teaching Portfolio

Andrew Rose
arose3@mail.sfsu.edu | (610) 864 6258

Dear Search Committee,

I am a lecturer and digital humanities instructor with experience in and deep enthusiasm for designing and teaching interdisciplinary courses where literature, visual culture, performance, and theory are functionally and practically interlinked. I currently teach at Berkeley City College, where I have developed multimedia materials, structures, and formatting for online asynchronous courses introducing storytelling in American culture, as well as the humanities as a field of study, to undergraduates in a wide range of majors. Prior to my current position, I taught introductory humanities courses in-person at San Francisco State for a year as a Graduate Teaching Associate, developing syllabuses for classes on values and culture, and shaping assignments, lectures, and learning outcomes. I am dedicated to teaching as a vocation and motivated to contribute to the intellectual life of the communities I work within. Extension students are often working adults with full-time jobs and families. My aim is to facilitate access to the meaning-making practices of the humanities, and to help all students integrate the humanities, as a mode of thinking and analysis, into whatever work they do in their specific fields of interest.

Much of what I do in a physical classroom aims to prompt spontaneous responses to the materials I teach. To this end, in-person classes I’ve designed use simple, but consistent expressive exercises. For example, my values and culture classes opened with an intentional two minutes of quiet, internal reflection or orientation, followed by a moment for students to each write or draw something on an index card. I collected the index cards in lieu of calling names to mark attendance, and at the end of each semester I returned each student’s cards in chronological order as a picture of their class experience over time. Students have reported that this practice helped fold class themes and insights into their day-to-day lives.

The special challenges and profound flexibility of online asynchronous teaching require translating this emphasis on practice and development for a radically different informational landscape. My asynchronous courses are structured as guided, multi-path learning environments rather than linear content delivery. I design LMS modules as curated “threads” that combine short lecture writing, primary and secondary sources, video lectures, and varied interactive media. Each module takes a central question or theme (emotion, power, representation, or the social functions of storytelling, for example), and situates a selection of materials in relation to that question, asking students to read across media rather than treating them as separate domains. Students are given bounded but flexible choices about which materials to engage deeply, and assignments are designed to elicit specific, experience-based responses rather than generalized summaries. Throughout, I integrate critical framing directly into the instructional text, modeling how to analyze sources, question narrative assumptions, and connect cultural forms to institutional structures or historical communication flows.

Distance learning can be difficult on the student side for countless unique reasons. The clearest challenge now on the instructor side is the explosion of LLM use. I’m not convinced that instructors should take an antagonistic position, playing cat-and-mouse or attempting to definitively detect all uses of AI tools. My approach starts with designing assignments in formats or with deliverables that are impractical to generate automatically: extemporaneous video or audio journal entries, prompts requiring specific references to students’ own life experiences, and multimedia syntheses combining visual, audio, and written elements. In all cases, the standard is straightforward: students demonstrate direct, specific engagement with course materials and articulate something about their own thinking in relation to them.

My courses are designed to support students with a wide range of backgrounds, preparation levels, and external constraints. By structuring courses around central questions and offering multiple pathways through material, students are able to enter at different points and develop depth in areas that draw them in or resonate with their unique concerns while still engaging shared themes. Assignments are scaffolded and clearly framed, and posted announcements and feedback frequently return to expectations, reaffirming a focus on attention, specificity, and direct engagement rather than strict adherence to scholarly formality. Maintaining a relaxed atmosphere of voluntary exploration and low pressure creates a kind of vacuum that pulls students into the material.

Moving forward, I am particularly interested in continuing to develop and teach courses in cultural studies, American history and culture, cultural anthropology, critical theory, or storytelling, that are accessible to students with a range of professional and academic backgrounds and goals. My syllabuses move across media from literature to film to oral history to digital forms, while examining how meaning is constructed, circulated, and contested. As I complete my second M.A. in History, I am expanding my teaching to include courses in United States and world history that explore larger historical processes through localized, archival forms of evidence. These courses ask students to work with documents, images, testimonies, and other traces while attending to questions of perspective, absence, and institutional framing.

I would bring to UC Berkeley Extension a practice-based approach to humanities instruction that is rigorous, accessible, and grounded in direct engagement with materials. I am comfortable working within established course frameworks or developing new offerings in collaboration with program staff, and I have experience designing and maintaining asynchronous courses in Canvas that remain active, responsive, and intellectually coherent across varying enrollment levels. I take seriously the Extension mission of extending university-level inquiry beyond traditional boundaries, and I approach teaching as a way of helping students build something they can take away from the classroom and fold into their futures.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Andrew Rose