26 in ’26 (August 11, 2026)
I realized the other day that I am 26 in ’26.
Maybe it is the writer in me, but I immediately wanted to make something of that coincidence. This is also the year I begin my first faculty position, which has made 26 feel more than another birthday. I’m entering a profession I have spent much of my adult life preparing for, and lately I’ve been thinking less about finally getting here and more about what I want to do now that I am here.
I keep going back to something I’ve taught my students in oral communication: the self-fulfilling prophecy. We usually talk about it at the beginning of the semester, when I ask them to think about the expectations they are carrying into a new class and how those expectations might shape the way they experience it. I’ve always liked teaching that lesson early because there is something telling about how we enter a new space.
Before I teach my first class as an assistant professor at UTRGV, I want to write down what I hope for myself as an educator. So, 26 things for 26. Some are small, some will take years, and some will probably change in their entirety.
✎ᝰ.
1. Learn who my students are beyond their names.
I want to know my students as people. I want to know what they are interested in, what they hope to do after college, what they care about, what they are curious about, and what experiences they bring into the room with them. It’s far too easy to learn a name well enough to call attendance and mistaking that for knowing someone.
2. Teach with bilingual, biliterate, and bicultural (B3) students in mind.
This one matters to me, especially since I’ll be teaching at an HSI (Hispanic-Learning Institute) in the Rio Grande Valley. I want to continue learning about culturally sustaining pedagogy and thinking carefully about what it means to teach communication in a region where students move among languages, cultures, communities, and ways of knowing every day. I want that complexity to have a place in my classroom.
3. Help students become researchers.
I would love for a student to walk into my office someday with an idea they cannot quite articulate yet and ask, “Could I research this?” I want to help students turn curiosities into questions and questions into projects. Maybe that eventually means an independent study, a conference paper, or another opportunity. Mostly, I want students to understand that research is something they can do.
4. Write with my colleagues.
I hope to co-write with faculty at UTRGV. Some of the best conversations I have had as a scholar began when someone approached a question from a perspective I had not considered. I want collaboration to remain one of the ways my thinking is challenged and enlarged.
5. Keep learning how to design accessible courses.
My work with Universal Design for Learning (UDL) has made me much more attentive to the assumptions embedded within course design. I want to keep asking who can participate in an assignment, what barriers I may have inadvertently created, and how students can demonstrate learning in varied ways. I do not expect to perfect this; I do expect to keep working at it.
6. Give some of the speeches I assign.
If I ask students to stand in front of a room and speak, I should occasionally be willing to do the assignment too. I like the idea of giving students something concrete to critique and allowing my own rhetorical choices to become part of the lesson. They should be allowed to tell me what worked and what did not.
7. Create assignments connected to civic life.
I want students to think about what communication has to do with being a member of a community. Public speaking, rhetoric, argumentation, listening, advocacy, and deliberation all carry lives beyond a grade. I want to design assignments that allow students to consider what communicative responsibility looks like when people are affected by what we say and do.
8. Assign work that has somewhere to go.
I keep thinking about how many assignments students complete, submit, receive a grade on, and never open again. I want to experiment with work that can have a life after the due date. Maybe it becomes part of a portfolio, contributes to a community project, prepares someone for a professional setting, or becomes the beginning of a larger research project. I want students to make things they actually want to keep.
9. Have Socratic seminars every once in a while.
Some questions need more room than a lecture can give. I want to occasionally organize class around a question and see where students take it. I want them to disagree, reconsider, ask better questions, encounter an impasse, and learn that reaching an immediate answer is not always the most interesting outcome of a discussion.
10. Take at least one class outside.
Embrace the outdoors every once in a while.
11. Spend more time in the library with my classes.
I want students to know how to actually use a university library. I want to bring librarians into my courses, spend time on research instruction, work through databases together, and teach students how to follow a citation until it takes them somewhere unexpected. Knowing how to find information is a skill in its own right.
12. Turn my dissertation into a book.
I’m not ready to be finished with the questions that occupied so much of my doctoral work. There are places I want to revisit, arguments I want to complicate, and ideas that have already begun changing since I wrote them. I want to give the dissertation another life as a book.
13. Work with our speech lab.
Communication centers have been part of my life as both a student and educator, and they changed how I think about teaching. There is a particular kind of learning that happens when someone can rehearse, stop, try again, ask a question, receive feedback, and try once more. I want to remain connected to that work.
14. End each semester by actually talking about the semester.
I want an end-of-semester debrief. I want to ask students what they remember, what they struggled with, what surprised them, what they would change, and what they are still thinking about. I imagine I will learn quite a bit from these conversations.
15. Make room for workshops.
Sometimes students need time to work while the professor is actually in the room. I want days where we write, rehearse speeches, pull apart arguments, workshop ideas, revise, and ask questions. I want to be able to sit beside a student and work through the thing that is giving them trouble while it is still taking shape.
16. Keep going to conferences.
SSCA and NCA have become important parts of my academic life, and I want to continue showing up. I also hope I can eventually help students experience conferences for themselves. There is something invaluable about discovering that the questions discussed in one classroom belong to conversations happening among people outside the classroom.
17. Keep publishing.
There are many things I still want to write about. I want to keep pursuing questions that interest and fascinate me, and I want my scholarship to remain open to the questions that emerge from teaching.
18. Leave my departmental hallway.
I want to collaborate with people in other departments. My own research already wanders across politics, history, linguistics, and other avenues, and I suspect some of the most interesting projects will begin in conversations with people who do not share the same disciplinary background.
19. Try portfolio-based assignments.
I want students to be able to look at something they produced in August and then return to it in December with different eyes. There is value in seeing evidence that your thinking has changed.
20. Develop genealogy-based assignments.
I have become increasingly interested in genealogy as a mode of inquiry, especially its attention to antecedents and histories. I want to experiment with assignments that ask students to choose a theory, idea, or communicative practice and trace how it came to mean what it means now.
21. Use the whole classroom.
I do not want to become attached to my podium. I want to move around. I want to sit with students during workshops, change the arrangement of the room when the conversation calls for it, use circles and small groups, and pay attention to how the physical space of a classroom shapes who speaks and how we listen.
22. Never stop reading.
And I do not only mean scholarly texts. I hope to continue reading fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and whatever book I pick up because someone mentioned it in passing. I hope I always have a book on my nightstand.
23. Remember that my students can teach me.
I hope I never become so comfortable with the role of professor that I begin to think learning travels in only one direction. My students will know things I do not know. They will have experiences I have not had. They will read things differently than I do. Sometimes they will ask a question I cannot answer. I want to remain the kind of person who learns from my students.
24. Write with my students.
I want to have writing sessions where everyone, including me, is working on something. I think students deserve to see that writing does not come fully formed/developed. Sometimes the sentence you spent twenty minutes fixing gets deleted the next morning. Sometimes you realize halfway through writing something that you do not believe your own argument anymore. That is part of writing too.
25. Ask students to practice self-reflexivity.
I want students to leave my courses knowing more about communication, but I also want them to know more about how they communicate. I want them to think about their assumptions, their habits, rhetorical choices, and the ways their own experiences shape how they encounter other people.
26. Keep the classroom in conversation with the world outside it.
I want there to be room in my courses for what is happening around us. That might mean something happening at UTRGV, something unfolding in the Rio Grande Valley, or a global/national event. If it gives us an opportunity to think more carefully about communication, I want to make space for it. I want students to leave class noticing rhetoric, theory, language, and communication in places they did not notice them before.
✎ᝰ.
I am writing all of this before I have taught my first class as an assistant professor, so there is an obvious caveat: I do not yet know what I do not know. That is partly why I wanted to write this before I begin.
There is a version of myself at 26 who has spent years thinking about what it might be like to become a professor but has not yet had enough time in the profession to become accustomed to it. Years from now, I would like to come back to this post.
Maybe I will laugh at a few of these. Maybe some will have become such routine parts of my teaching that I will have forgotten there was ever a time when I had to write them down. Maybe I will have abandoned a few because experience taught me something better.
For now, though, this is what I want to remember at 26.
The G.O.O.S. Framework (July 22, 2026)
This summer, I had the opportunity to return to the University of Memphis Writing and Communication Services (WCS) to help revise consultant training materials and develop Canvas modules for communication consultants. Having spent three years as a consultant with WCS and 2 years working as a speech coach in the Hauser Speech Lab at UTRGV, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of what happens during a consultation. What I hadn’t spent much time thinking about was how consultants learn to have conversations with clients in the first place.
As I began writing/editing/revising the modules, I kept remembering consultations I had with students. A student would sit down with a speech outline, a presentation, or an assignment prompt and immediately begin talking about what they wanted to fix. Sometimes it was the introduction, yet other times it was organization or evidence. Those conversations have always been important, but they also reminded me that we were usually starting in the middle of the process. Before any of those decisions could be made, there was another question sitting quietly underneath them: What is this assignment actually asking you to do?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized how often that question gets overlooked. Students spend a great deal of time completing assignments, but much less time interpreting them. Communication courses ask students to do more than prepare speeches or write papers, and most often, they ask students to recognize audiences, respond to rhetorical situations, make strategic decisions, and think carefully about the kind of communication a particular situation calls for.
That conversation eventually grew into one of my favorite projects from the summer. Dr. Meredith Boulden introduced the acronym G.O.O.S., and together we developed it into a framework for communication consultants. GOOS stands for Growth, Opportunities, Obstacles, and Strengths, but what I appreciate most about the framework is that it begins with questions instead of answers. Consultants are encouraged to help students identify what is already working, where opportunities exist, what challenges they anticipate, and what they hope to accomplish before anyone starts suggesting revisions. The framework slows the conversation down just enough for students to make sense of their own thinking.
I didn’t expect to keep returning to GOOS once the modules were finished, but I have. As I’ve been preparing courses for my first semester at UTRGV, I’ve caught myself thinking about where the framework belongs in my own classroom. I can see it shaping speech workshops, rhetorical analysis assignments, peer review sessions, and conversations during office hours. Helping students become adept communicators often begins by helping them become more careful readers of the situations they are asked to enter.
Looking back, I think this is a framework I’ll continue to use for years to come. Working with WCS over the summer allowed me to revisit a kind of work that has been part of my life for several years, but it also encouraged me to see those experiences a little differently. Before students can make judicious rhetorical choices, they first have to understand the communicative task an assignment places before them.
For anyone interested, I’ve included the GOOS Framework below. Meredith and I developed it as part of the communication consultant curriculum, and I am looking forward to seeing how it continues to shape my own teaching.
(Created via Canva’s graphic design platform.)
Looking Ahead: The Rhetorical Dragnet (July 14, 2026)
Every research project seems to begin the same way for me. I become fixated on a question that I cannot quite answer, and instead of moving on, I keep reading, writing, and collecting pieces until something finally begins to take shape.
This article began with stories that I could not get out of my head. Over the last several months, I found myself following reports of immigration raids across the country, reading about unlawful searches in border communities, and (more recently) learning about the death of a 26-year-old (Joan Sebastian Durán Guerrero) following an ICE operation in California. I would close the article, only to find myself thinking about it again later that day. As someone who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, I could not help but think about home. I thought about the checkpoints that have always been part of life in South Texas, the questions that become routine, and the ways border communities have learned to live alongside surveillance. Those stories eventually followed me back to my desk, where they became the starting point for my newest article, which will appear in an upcoming collection published through the Department of English at The University of Memphis.
For months, I read through presidential speeches, Department of Homeland Security documents, news coverage, and scholarship on surveillance technologies. Somewhere in the middle of all that reading, I realized I was noticing the same pattern over and over again. Conversations about immigration often begin with one person or one event, but they rarely stay there. The language widens until suspicion reaches entire communities. That observation eventually became the foundation for a concept I call the rhetorical dragnet.
Most people know what a dragnet is. Law enforcement casts a wide net while searching for one suspect, but everyone caught inside that net becomes part of the investigation. I kept returning to that image because it captured what I was seeing across the texts I was studying. Political rhetoric has a way of expanding suspicion. It begins with an individual, then reaches a family, neighborhoods, cities, or entire populations. Once that expansion takes place, broad forms of surveillance become easier to corroborate (I use this term loosely here) because the public has already been taught who should be viewed with suspicion.
As I continued writing, I found myself asking the following question: How do computational systems learn who should be considered suspicious? Algorithms do not create those assumptions on their own, as they are built within sociopolitical environments that have already decided what information should be collected. By the time a computational system begins sorting people into categories of risk, many of those decisions have already been made. That realization became the spirit of this project. The rhetorical dragnet offers a way of thinking about how political language travels into computational systems and how those systems, in turn, reproduce patterns of suspicion on a much larger scale.
One of the reasons I continue to appreciate the field of rhetoric is that it reminds me to slow down and pay attention to language that others may overlook. The words we choose shape policies and affect the ways people encounter one another. My hope is that this article encourages readers to think a little more carefully about the relationship between rhetoric, technology, and the immigrant communities that continue to live with the weight of both.
I’ll leave you with a photo of where this article is currently being written. Every project seems to find its own place, and for now, this is where the rhetorical dragnet continues to take shape.
Benjamin & Marian Schuster Performing Arts Center, Dayton, OH.
Finding the Border in Dayton, OH (July 8th, 2026)
When I first imagined this blog, I assumed I would write my first post somewhere in my hometown, the Rio Grande Valley. It seemed fitting. After all, much of my research, teaching, and writing has centered on the region that raised me. Instead, I am writing this from Dayton, Ohio, a place that, at first glance, appears to have very little to do with borders. That is probably why it feels like the right place to begin.
My husband currently works in Dayton as the Chief Deputy Clerk for the Montgomery County Courthouse, and before I begin my appointment this fall as Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, we have been spending a little more time here together. I knew very little about Dayton before arriving, so I have spent the last several weeks doing what I usually do whenever I find myself somewhere unfamiliar. I walk around, ask questions, read local history, and pay attention to the things that most people seem to overlook.
One of the first things I noticed was how different the flow of the city feels from the places I have called home. During the middle of the day, the streets become noticeably quiet. There is traffic, but very little congestion (an unfamiliar feeling to me). People move through the city without much urgency, and there are moments when it feels as though everything has slowed down just enough for you to notice details that would normally disappear in the rush of everyday life.
As my husband drove us around the city, he would casually mention that we had entered Kettering or Beavercreek before eventually making our way back into Dayton. I remember looking out the window trying to figure out when those transitions had happened. Nothing around me suggested that we had crossed into another municipality. There was no obvious marker that announced one city had ended and another had begun. The roads continued, and neighborhoods blended together. If no one had said anything, I would have assumed we were still in Dayton.
Eventually, I found Dayton’s zoning maps and began looking at the city differently. I wanted to know where Dayton officially began and where it officially ended. I traced neighborhood lines, parks, industrial districts, universities, and municipal boundaries, wondering how these divisions came to exist and what they meant for the people who lived within them. The more I read, the more I realized that I was asking the same questions here that I ask in my research.
(1) How do places become divided?
(2) Who decides where those divisions belong?
(3) What happens to the people who live within them?
As I continued reading about Dayton, I learned that much of what I was experiencing reflected the city’s history. Population decline, suburban expansion, and changing industries have all shaped the landscape that exists today. Dayton is often described as a Rust Belt city (a place experiencing deindustrialization), but that description alone tells only part of the story.
I spend a great deal of time thinking about borders because they are central to my scholarship, but being here reminded me that borders are not confined to the edges of nation-states. They also exist in cities, between neighborhoods, school districts, rivers, highways, and municipal governments. They influence where resources flow, communities grow, and how people come to understand the places they call home.
I arrived assuming I was spending a few quiet weeks in the Midwest before returning to South Texas. Instead, I found myself seeing Dayton as its own kind of borderland. The Great Miami River separates neighborhoods, and highways connect people while also creating physical divisions across the city. These are different kinds of borders than the one that runs through the Rio Grande Valley, but they still shape belonging and opportunity.
As I kept reading, another history became central to my understanding of Dayton. Long before Dayton existed as a city, this land was home to Indigenous nations (Shawnee, Miami, Lenape, Wyandot, Ottawa, Seneca, Erie, and Kickapoo) whose histories continue long after treaties and forced removal attempted to erase them. Every place has stories that existed before its current borders, and those stories deserve our attention because they remind us that borders are made by people, and remembered differently depending on who is telling the story.
I think that is what I will remember most about my time here.
I came to Dayton expecting to wait for the next chapter of my life to begin. Instead, Dayton reminded me that every place has something to teach us if we are willing to pay attention. For someone who studies borders, there is something fitting about discovering one where I never expected to find it. It reminded me that borders also exist wherever histories meet, and communities overlap.
Perhaps there is no better place for Writings from the Borderlands to begin than here. Dayton may never be the first place people think of when they hear the word “border,” but it has reminded me that borders are everywhere once you learn how to see them.
Cox Arboretum, Dayton, OH.