TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
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My pedagogical approach is humility-centered and community-oriented. I aim to create a collaborative and interactive environment where the power of the word is shared. I enter the classroom aiming to divest myself from any pretense to mastery and instead, I strive to engage students in a mutually constructed meaning-making process. I aim to be attentive, attuned to, and awake to students’ contributions in order to reflect their inner creativity and inherent brilliance back to them. As such, I regard listening as a core part of my work.
This practice is grounded in anti-oppressive teaching principles that I have critically thought about alongside students, most recently in a course I designed and titled “Educate to Liberate: A Survey of Radical Pedagogies.”
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While I design rigorous, process-oriented classes, I believe students journey must ultimately be motivated by their self-recognized capacity and desire for learning. As such, I work to connect students with the animating questions at the core of their inner lives. In practice, that involves robustly engaging and affirming their ideas in in-class settings, feedback review sessions and office hours, as well as engaging them in a reflective, metacognitive process. I ask students how their current essay or poem may carry over into the next assignment, into their next class, into their current major. What question proves most relevant to their lives? Does their poem or short story belong in an as-of-yet-to-be-born body of work? Is it part of a larger process of self-discovery?
By pushing students to find animating questions and sharpen the ideas born from their self-led inquiries, I aim to follow the evidence-based approach outlined in the Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching which posits that students must be rigorously challenged if they are to be successful in their learning journey and that learning must be made relevant to their lives.
At the same time, the guide cautions that students must also be given the confidence and tools to meet those rigorous challenges. As such, I also work hard to design assignment sequences that allow students to slowly build toward greater levels of possibility. This is an iterative, ever-developing process that I fine-tune in accordance with the institutional demands of each course, and the culturally specific needs of each student group.
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In both academic and creative writing classes, I engage students in exercises that ground them in their bodies and connect them to a felt, renewed experience of their surroundings. As Susan Sontag writes, speaking of the goal of literary criticism, I aim to create assignments that make “our own experience, more, rather than less real to us.
As an example of how I do this, I’ll note that I routinely ask that students complete handwritten assignments, and device activities that ask them to map, photograph, contemplate, draw, rest in, wrestle with and engage their surroundings—from their dorm rooms to natural areas on campus.
As a former resident of Fallen Tree Meditation Center and a graduate of East Bay Meditation’s yearlong training program in the delivery of secular mindfulness teachings, I also incorporate short breathing exercises and other tools for self-regulation into the classroom, providing students with much-needed resources to meet the emotional demands of my courses and of our times.
ACADEMIC COURSES TAUGHT
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Course Description: At the core of our lives is the question “Who am I?” As Beverly Daniel Tatum writes, the answer to this question is shaped “by individual characteristics, family dynamics, historical factors, and social and political contexts. In this course, we will explore how U.S.-based writers of undocumented experience (many of whom arrived to the U.S as young children) have explored their multilayered identity and experience through poetry. Living at the intersection of different histories of oppression, these writers summon memory and negotiate language in order to define themselves on their own terms. By reflecting on how these writers have looked at their own lives, and what their writings reveal about society at large, I hope you will discover new way of deepening your exploration of self.
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Following the death of beloved Cornell University Professor Debra Castillo, I facilitated this course for half a semester, supporting her students in the completion of the original course goals.
We engaged in creative writing exercises that involved physical movement and other embodied activities, including mindfulness-based practices and theater warm-up games. The purpose of these exercises was to awaken the senses to more easily access our embodied memory in the writing process. The creative writing pieces we developed and revised served as the foundation for a 10-minute play we collectively staged thereby honoring the course’s original intent and Professor Castillo’s teachings. Although the performance was not presented in the Microteatro festival, as originally intended, we kept with the festival theme of “Disruptions,” and presented it in a special showcasing that included Professor Catillos’ friends, colleagues and family members.
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In what classes, and under what learning circumstances, have you felt most fulfilled? In what circumstances, by contrast, did you experience hurt or disappointment? Together we will study authors who propose new ways of assessing the value and worth of our distinct educational experiences. These authors invite us to consider what counts as true learning and to inquire into the conditions that make such learning possible. At this critical juncture in your educational path, I hope this class will strengthen your autonomy as a student and support you in taking greater ownership of your education journey.
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Course Description: What if the past is not in the past? If we put our history in front of us instead of behind us, how might our world change? In this class., we will study BIPOC poets, writers and artists whose works keep us from quickly moving on or making peace with harm. As they reckon with histories of slavery and colonialism, they show us that these don’t belong to a past that is over; that these violences, though they have morphed over time, continue. As these writers and artists navigate fear and uncertainty about the state of our world, they also mourn for their ancestors and work against their own erasure. In this course, we will write personal and critical essays that challenge us to do the same.
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This class will seek to awaken your senses to help you develop a more intimate relationship with language; one that demonstrates how words, much like paint, brick and stone, can be experienced and worked with as felt material. In learning how to appreciate and work with this material in a more physical way, I hope you will recognize your body as the primary vessel of creation—a site where memory is stored and alchemized by our imagination. You will be encouraged to write from and with your bodies; to lean into vulnerability, undo shame, and unabashedly relish the pleasure and joy of living.
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Course Description and Rationale: Can we tell our truth in a language that has been imposed upon us? What happens when our stories are demanded, when telling them can determine our future? In this class, we will study the works of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color for whom standardized English has been an obstacle to telling their truth. We will also read essays about undocumented children and youth, inquiring into their experience within a legal system that compels them to tell their stories, as well as about their struggles representing themselves before majoritarian audiences to advance their claims for citizenship and access higher education. Lastly, we will look at how writers reclaim historical truth by subverting multiculturalist discourses that seek to co-opt and downplay the oppressive and ongoing violence their writings testify against. All the while, we will consider how poetry makes possible such resistance and how we might come to tell our own stories taking into account the many obstacles to reclaiming our true voice.