At the core of her teaching, Olivia Cole believes that her students are the experts of their own lives. Her role as an educator isn’t to teach them how to sound like a “real writer” but to guide them through the knowledge of their own experiences and help them cultivate the voice that is already inside them. This cultivation can be a challenge when students are coming from schools that center a canon which feels unfamiliar to them, so in her classroom she does her best to focus on offering works that reflect the world as it is – multigenerational, multicultural – and not as it appears on an AP test. Her deepest-held belief is that even if the student leaves her classroom and never writes a poem again, the strength and healing that comes with finding and valuing their own voice will follow them through their life journey.
As a teacher, what she attempts to foster is as important as what she hopes to dampen. She teaches against perfectionism and for process. She teaches against competition and for community. Her approach is trauma informed and asks questions about the world on and off the page: there are social, political, and economic forces that shape the making of literature, and she asks her students to consider those forces in class conversations. She also asks her students to locate themselves in the work they read and the work they create. She believes that there is healing to be found in the stories we tell about our lives, and the first step toward healing is taking a deep breath and beginning to explore the world of the self.
