My teaching builds on many years of community education in media activism, public health, and youth work. I strive to teach with an eye towards using humanizing the classroom with a focus on radical care, honest conversations and vulnerability; sociological imagination – connecting the dots between personal issues, power dynamics, and systemic factors; anti-racism; and embodied learning as well as participatory strategies and creative methods.
I am experimenting A LOT with the continuous, brutal, and liberation realization that most educational spaces (including my classes) are steeped in imperial, racist, white supremacist practices, colonizing, destructive capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative practices and structures. I have been looking to Adrienne Brown‘s notion of Emergent Strategy to shift from plantation, essentially status quo/conventional teaching and learning to the forest, a more holistic, emergent, inductive space where students and I are working more collaboratively to determine the values, content, practices for learning and assessment. I also draw heavily from visual culture, music, art, visual methods and other creative platforms in a manner that cultivates participatory spaces of inquiry for students to lift the hood on the status quo and look to old and new understandings and possibilities for collective action and social change. I place a strong emphasis on critical thinking in terms of addressing a subject from multiple perspectives.
My classroom is a space for students to develop their ideas, their passions and interests and develop new and previously unexplored connections. Recognizing the learning styles of students and the social diversity of the class greatly informs the content and structure of my classes. I view the classroom as a relational space for students to explore a wide range of “standpoints” based on their collective negotiation with interlocking experiences of gender, race, class, sexuality, nationality, and other social forces. I seek to create a learning environment that encourages students to uncover the very different positions and perspectives that we each bring with us to make sense of our social worlds.