The first time I worked with a student veteran, I immediately became aware of my lack of knowledge of and exposure to this new demographic that college campuses are now beginning to see in incredibly large numbers.  I was dreadfully concerned about not speaking to the student like a child during this tutoring session as most of my previous years of teaching experience were with K-12 classrooms.  I averted my eyes from his amputated legs, missing fingers, and scars to boldly demonstrate that I was seasoned in working with wounded warriors, when in fact, I wasn’t.   I hid my reaction to my silent discovery during our time together that his difficulty with short-term memory was probably a symptom of a traumatic brain injury, and I proceeded with our session as if this were a common occurrence in my teaching.
     I also was completely engaged in the student’s essay on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd.  I was intrigued by his ideas on justice and ethics surrounding a text that takes place in a

military setting.  In the paper, he defended Billy Budd’s decision to kill Captain Claggart despite the student’s own military background and training--one that traditionally emphasizes the importance of respecting the chain of command.  He had worked to synthesize his personal perspective as a veteran with ideas that he had formed throughout the course of his semester in his Ethics of Justice class, during which he read the theories and philosophies of Kant, Bentham, Aristotle, and Rawls.  The student brought a set of experiences to his reading of the text that many traditional students do not possess, and I saw incredible value in that.
   

     I spent the next year serving as a TA for courses in which most, if not all, of the students were veterans of the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  During this time, I continued to recognize the need to learn more about the specialized learning needs of student veterans with ​​​​​​​​​traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) while also becoming increasingly aware of the tremendous value that student veterans bring to college classrooms with their varying backgrounds and perspectives.
     This digital portfolio will serve as a conglomerate of my previous professional and academic experiences as well as a means to become more adequately equipped for a future position as an educator of student veterans on a community college campus.  I will pull from my teaching experiences with students of all ages, and in particular, my firm belief that has been formed over the past eight years that instruction must in some capacity be differentiated according to individual student needs.   Much of my work on this project will also springboard off of the post-secondary pedagogical philosophy that I have begun to form in my 
 

Approaches to Teaching Writing and Approaches to Teaching Literature courses at Georgetown as well as insights I am gaining from teaching and tutoring student veterans who are transitioning to civilian life and often working to overcome symptoms of TBIs and PTSD.

     In The Making of Meaning: Metaphors, Models, and Maxims for Writing Teachers, Ann Berthoff writes, “Composing involves the writer in making choices all along the way and thus has social and political implications; we aren’t free unless we know how to choose.  Teaching composition as a process can put students in touch with their own minds; it can give them back their language.  It is not too much to claim that the composition classroom is a place where students can discover their humanity in both a moral and political sense” (22).  I fervently believe that writing and literature classrooms are some of the key spaces in which students can begin to question, form and articulate their identities, have revelations, and even experience some capacity of healing.  It is my goal to explore teaching practices that will allow for this type of learning and growth in a post-secondary classroom that is differentiated for all students, including student veterans.