Sarah Barringer is one of the most committed and talented graduate instructors I’ve had the privilege to know. Her preparation, pedagogical knowledge, and creativity in designing courses are all extraordinary. Her students are lucky to have her.
Sarah’s CV likely speaks for itself, but I will nonetheless play the hits. Teaching experience of every possible variety for an English PhD student (including three distinct versions of the Interpretation of Literature). Two teaching awards. A Certificate in College Teaching on the way. Multiple years teaching in the Writing Center. A talk on pedagogy, a leadership role in the General Education Literature program, and a certificate from the Center for the Integration of Teaching, Research & Learning. This is someone who, even as she has made excellent progress on a very promising dissertation, is clearly looking to take advantage of every opportunity to become an excellent teacher. This is someone who is, in fact, already an excellent teacher.
I first met Sarah in 2020, when she reached out to me to talk about strategies for leading discussion sections, which fell to her as part of her role as a TA in the Foundations of the English Major course. She struck me then as someone eager to learn everything there was to know about teaching. In her first month in a teaching role, she already had great instincts, but was intent on getting even better, on anticipating challenges, on more clearly understanding her students and their learning goals. Over the years, as Sarah went on to teach Rhetoric, and then the Interpretation of Literature, we stayed in contact, meeting periodically to talk about teaching. In Fall 2022, she enrolled in the Practicum in College Teaching, a sort of independent study in which I would mentor her as she taught a section of Rhetoric and designed a new section for the following semester. Every two weeks, we met and talked teaching: we covered a lot of ground, from the challenges of teaching about race and racism, to the ins and outs of responding to student work, to the benefits of scaffolding writing assignments. Throughout, Sarah always impressed me with the rightness of her teaching instincts. She asks a lot of questions—she wants to hear as much as possible about how something can be done—and then comes up with a solution to a teaching problem perfectly suited to her particular strengths as a teacher, and her particular students.
I’ve gotten to see Sarah in action on three different occasions: twice teaching Rhetoric in the Fall of 2022 and the Spring of 2023, and once teaching The Interpretation of Literature in the Spring of 2025. All three class periods were marvels of well-structured pedagogy, in which every minute seemed to be planned out so that students would be doing the work necessary for their learning. Sarah is a meticulous teacher, though that diligence is not always visible to her students, who know her as a personable, kind, and wise guide to the skills her courses are helping them develop.
In the first class I visited, I observed Sarah’s Rhetoric class at work on an activity that had students practice the skills they would need for an upcoming research paper. Sarah had brought in piles of magazines for the activity. In groups, students selected articles that fit their broad topics, collaborated on an argument that tied three of those articles together, and wrote summaries of the articles that would anchor the kind of analysis they would need to do in their “real” papers. After a brief full-class lesson on annotated bibliographies (in which Sarah helped them understand their various purposes and showed them some example entries from her own work), groups went to work on an annotated bibliography of their magazine articles. Throughout, students were remarkably engaged, effectively cooperative, and obviously cheerful. Sarah had clearly laid the groundwork, both in her framing of the activity and in the many class periods that preceded this class, for a classroom community in which students felt comfortable working together to figure out how to do the things the course required—the valuable skills they would take forward with them into the remainder of their education.
The following semester I visited another of Sarah’s Rhetoric classes, and observed an even more masterful execution of an active learning class period. Students were given a series of engaging tasks that allowed them to practice analysis, synthesis, and, ultimately, advocacy, in a way that let them see for themselves how these practices are always intertwined. After watching a polemical YouTube video (“Instagram is BAD for Black Women”), groups of students each took a different category of analysis (rhetor, medium, argument, etc.) and took ten minutes to brainstorm points for their category, writing them on different parts of the whiteboard. Sarah called on each group to walk the class through their analysis, responding, expanding, clarifying as she went. She somehow, all at once, engaged with the group and their points, nudged them toward things they didn’t think of, and used their ideas as springboards for questions that got the whole class involved. Next, Sarah gave each group a different section of the video’s transcript, and asked them to find the arguments therein, the ones about plastic surgery especially (that was a class theme). Then she went around, group by group, to hear arguments. Again, she did a great job of both recording what each group said—the students had done quite well—and adding to what they said to benefit the whole class. After all the groups had gone, Sarah did some great synthesis work, calling attention to connections between groups’ responses on the board, adding overarching concluding thoughts about the way the rhetor’s arguments fit together. The final activity was perhaps the most impressive. Sarah wrote a list of mediums on the board (graphic novel, magazine advertisement, email, documentary film, etc.) and assigned each group to pick a medium and use it to make one of the video’s arguments. How would the argument change? What would be your strategy? I initially thought the task was for groups to talk about how they would do it, but it quickly became clear that Sarah wanted them to actually make the thing in the class’s final twenty minutes. Groups got right to work, clearly engaged and in high spirits. One group headed out to the hallway to film their documentary!
One group wrote an email to Adam Mosseri, the CEO of Instagram. Another created a graphic ad, with the Instagram logo accompanying text encouraging users to “Be insecure about your body! Compare yourself to others!” Another group wrote a “news article” which was more like an infographic (a headline and four bullet-pointed takeaways): “Shocking Long-Term Effects of Social Media on Body Image Discovered.” The documentary was, it must be said, shockingly good for something produced in less than 10 minutes. After groups shared their creations, Sarah tied their work to the class’s advocacy assignment, coming a few weeks later in the semester: what medium might you want to use for that? How does the choice of medium affect the message? What possibilities might there be?
Finally, in the last few minutes of class, Sarah distributed notecards, asking students to write down questions they had about the upcoming research assignment. She promised to address all questions in the next class. It was a fitting capstone to a class period in which students were empowered to both practice their already impressive rhetorical skills and experiment with new skills that, with Sarah’s expert guidance, they would become proficient in as the semester continued. I left the class not quite sure how Sarah managed to accomplish so much in an hour and fifty minute
In the Spring of 2025, I sat in on one of Sarah’s Interpretation of Literature classes. The class period focused on close reading, and I got to see, yet again, how well Sarah designs class activities to put students to work to develop important skills. All over the classroom, on giant printouts pinned to the walls, were prose poems from Sofia Samatar’s Monster Portraits, a 2018 “travelogue” in which Samatar goes “into the field to study monsters in their environment.” After some announcements and reminders, Sarah called attention to a handful of exceptional responses from students’ homework, briefly noting what students were doing well—it was a small gesture, but one that I’ll be taking for my own classroom. Students got both an indication that their instructor was reading their writing seriously and encouragement that the work they had been putting in was paying of
Sarah then informed the class that they would be practicing close reading. It’s the same thing they did during the previous class, but now with a “fancy name” given to it. “Don’t freak out. You’ve done this before,” she said. She explained that the students will be doing close reading on the poems pinned up around the room. First, though, they would practice together, as a whole class. Students got into groups, and were given a two-sided handout. Everyone had the same poem (“Shadow Beast”) on one side; the other side had a different poem depending on the group. The task was to annotate “Shadow Beast” in stages. First, Sarah read the poem aloud and gave students two minutes to write down anything they noticed. Students immediately started annotating their poems—it was clear that they had done this before. “Shadow Beast” was pinned up at the front of the room—as Sarah asked students to share some of the things they noticed, she annotated the poem on the wall. Next up was diction: what are some interesting words we notice? Are any words used in unusual ways? Again, students were given a couple of minutes to think and write, before they shard what they came up with for the whole class. This pattern was repeated through categories narrative voice, tone, and rhetorical and literary devices. In a very short amount of time, students came up with a lot to say about a poem that probably seemed opaque and mystifying at first. As in her Rhetoric classes, Sarah showed herself to be a deft responder to student ideas, pivoting between the student sharing and the rest of the class, making sure that everyone was engaged throughout the process.
Following this shared close reading, groups were sent off to begin annotating the poem on the back of their handouts. Each group had a different poem, which was both on their handouts and on the wall where they were sitting. Following Sarah’s guidance, students discussed and then annotated their poem for diction—paying attention to the word choices. Sarah then went around the room and each group shared one example of diction from their poem that they found interesting. After this, groups rotated, getting a new poem to work with. They added to the annotations on the printed poem with new observations about the poem’s narrative voice. More sharing out, then another rotation. After students worked on tone and rhetorical devices, all of the poems on the wall were covered in a riot of annotations, visual evidence of all of the work students had put in. Next, Sarah gave groups a series of questions to consider about their original poem: what is this monster a metaphor for? What do the things you noticed point to? After their group discussions, students shared with the whole class what they came up with. Sarah pointed out that the process they went through in class was an excellent way to construct arguments for their upcoming essays: close reading in steps followed by using the product of that close reading as evidence to make claims about what the text is doing.
Like the previous class periods I observed, this one showed off Sarah’s commitment to evidence-based pedagogy: in Sarah’s classes, students do stuff. Class is clearly a space in which students do the work of learning—it’s clear from how her students respond to her questions, and how enthusiastically they throw themselves into the activities she designs, that Sarah has taught them that class time is not a time when they sit back and listen to the professor drone on and on. Her classroom is an inspiring space to visit, in which students (none of whom are English majors, I should note) excitedly close read poems and discover that doing so is a valuable activity. It’s difficult to overstate how rare this is to find in a graduate instructor, how advanced a pedagogue Sarah already is. She has my highest recommendation.