Biography
Nikki Mantyla never wanted to leave school, so she didn't! She loves the expansive, energizing atmosphere of college campuses where conversations revolve around exciting ideas.
Mantyla mainly teaches first-year composition classes, encouraging students to explore their writing process as they investigate a variety of interesting topics. Sometimes she also gets to teach creative writing, mythology, grammar or literature to spice things up. In any of her courses, she is passionate about creating a classroom community where everyone learns from each other through discussions and activities. Her teaching motto is "Mix it up. Keep it real. Make it fun."
Mantyla's academic interests include pedagogy & course design, novel writing, rhetorical grammar, and punctuation mechanics. She also has a geeky curiosity for deep dives of all kinds (psych, linguistics, archetypes, you name it).
Outside of academia, she loves DIY home renovation and camping in the woods. In her spare time, she's taken up French and cello to expand her language and music mastery. She appreciates how trying new things stretches her mind/heart/body and reinforces the humility of being a beginner.
Teaching Philosophy
Mantyla sees teaching as an art form. It requires blending knowledge transfer with human connection, quantitative assignments with qualitative perspective, technical instruction with emotional awareness, requirements with leniency, structure with creativity, mind with heart. She sees education as an opportunity for transformation by sharing experiences and stretching expertise together. And she sees it, of course, as an evolutionary step toward students' futures, in which they will need certain writing skills that she can help them improve.
Mantyla also believes that the best learning happens through experimentation. She wants them to "muck about in sentences," as famous author Annie Dillard once described the art of writing, so that they get to discover for themselves the many methods of giving life to the words on the page.
Published Work
Mantyla helped create the OER textbook "Open English @ SLCC" by writing several of the essays as well as editing, transferring and formatting her colleague's essays into the online work for Salt Lake Community College. Her articles there include "Why Six Core Concepts? So You Can Write ANYTHING," "Memorability: Six Keys for Success," "Punctuation, Memes & Choice," and "Movies Explain the World (of Writing)."
She is currently working on a similar OER project called "Composition at CMU" to pull together the best available writing articles and enhance them for optimal student engagement.