Cara Stepanian

Background

About Cara Stepanian

I love teaching and I love learning. With over a decade of hands on teaching experience, in both urban and suburban settings, I am a committed lifelong learner. My main interests are secondary digital literacies and teacher education in this field. In my secondary English classroom I continuously work hard to design and execute lessons that focus on a variety of literature and that inspire and influence student thinking and writing. I tend to teach through an historical lens and prefer to evaluate literature by looking at the time it was written, the time it is written about, the life of the author and the social and historical contexts of all involved. My mantra in the classroom is “art imitates life. Literature is art.” We can learn a lot about ourselves by reflecting on the ways people and their interactions with others are portrayed in texts, both fiction and non-fiction. I approach writing instruction in much the same way — giving students the tools to evaluate the context, voice and purpose of each piece of writing. I think it is important to stress that writing is an act of thinking and certainly an act of revision. My second classroom mantra is “writing is fluid not stone.” Finding ones voice as a writer and learning to be comfortable with that voice is an enormous – yet not insurmountable – feat.