TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Pedagogical Approach
A core tenet of my research—that we make meaning through everyday practices of storytelling—guides my teaching philosophy. I facilitate classroom learning that scaffolds students’ comprehension of historical, sociocultural, and media theories by placing them in everyday narrative contexts. Specifically, I design coursework to build students’ skills in recognizing and analyzing claims about meaning-making within culture and lived experience.
Thus whether students are assessing Hobbes’ social contract, Foucault’s panoptic vision of power, or Turner’s frontier thesis, I provide a learning environment which places these theories within a broader tapestry of the stories we tell about ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Such a humanistic pedagogical framework helps to make complex and rigorous theories more legible, apprehendable, and applicable.
Helping students form their own academic stances is another vital component of my teaching philosophy. Many of my courses require final papers and/or media projects in which I ask students to create and sustain a well-thought out thesis statement. In all classes that require a final paper and/or project, I create opportunities for rigorous feedback and critique before final due dates, helping students to hone and submit more complex work.
Viewing course content as relevant and applicable to everyday life, when possible I enrich my pedagogy with Guest Lectures, Speaker Series, Field Trips, and other experiential learning opportunities.
I also fully embrace, and am thankful for, opportunities to teach and mentor students from historically underrepresented communities.
In all of these endeavors, I strive to bring an enthusiasm, critical rigor, and cultural responsiveness to my own teaching practice where I average a student approval rating of 98.71% (with an over 80% response rate) and was honored with a UC San Diego Panhellenic Association Outstanding Teaching Award.
Name and Gender Pronouns
Professional courtesy and sensitivity are especially important with respect to individuals and topics dealing with differences of race, culture, religion, politics, sexual orientation, gender, gender variance, and nationalities. Class rosters are provided to the instructor with the student’s legal name. I will gladly honor students’ request to be addressed by an alternate name or gender pronoun. Please advise me early in the quarter so that I may make appropriate changes to my records.
Commitment to Anti-Racist Pedagogy (from UC San Diego Department of Communication)
In solidarity with worldwide mobilizations that call on all of us to directly and explicitly address anti-Black violence, our courses recognize the need to transform our educational practices to support Black students, including those who occupy multiple marginalized identities around disability, class, socioeconomic status, gender, sexuality, language, and citizenship.
This requires applying a critical, anti-racist lens through which to read and engage with course material and apply to assignments, projects, and other creative works. It also necessitates a shared responsibility for maintaining our classroom as an actively anti-racist learning environment. Our courses call on all of us to cultivate a classroom environment built on mutual respect.
This means honoring (y)our responsibility to ensure the safety and comfort for all peers and instructors so we can collectively confront racism. It is important for those with racial or other privileges to recognize (y)our biases and make space to listen to and learn from peers and instructors who hold identities and experiences different from (y)our own.
Our courses are currently taking place in the midst of COVID-19 as well as the deeper pandemic of structural racism and state-sanctioned violence against Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) in particular. We recognize that each of us is differentially vulnerable to these crises. We also recognize that you are more than just students. Beyond your role in our classes, you may also be organizers, caretakers, or workers within your respective communities. As such, our courses are committed to assessment practices that value organizing, care, and the labor of surviving within inequitable systems as intellectual labor and a critical aspect of university education.