Samantha Tetangco Ocena

Grit Is Not It: Reckoning with Resilience in "Post"-Pandemic First-Year Composition

Samantha Tetangco Ocenais an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of California, Merced and former Associate Director of UC Merced’s writing program. She has 16 years of teaching and administration experience and has been an active voice around anti-racism initiatives on our campus, including the co-facilitation of an anti- racist pedagogy series and the chairing of an anti-racism task force charged with reflecting on the writing program’s pedagogical approaches and practices. As a Filipino lesbian whose parents had an atypical immigration experience, she has a unique understanding of what it means to navigate educational spaces which are often saturated with people whose experiences with the world do not reflect her own. A creative writer by trade, along with her publications in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction, she’s become known for curating spaces for writers to build community, set writing goals, and share advice and resilience strategies in a field that is ripe with rejection. For Sam, considerations about resilience in the classroom are similarly connected to having a strong sense of one’s relationship to writing, to writing feedback, to building community, and to one's own sense of their writing’s worth. She is currently working on a collection of pedagogical essays by people of color for people of color and her first poetry collection, Hope You Blend In: Studies in Color & Light, which explores her own intersectional identity as it navigates white spaces, is set to be released next year.