Teaching Portfolio

My philosophy of teaching is largely informed by my early graduate teaching experiences in Women’s, Gender, and Sexualities Studies classrooms where generative contention, collaboration, and intellectual exploration are practiced and valued. As a response to feminist theorist bell hooks’ and Jeannie Ludlow’s charge to shift our understanding of the classroom as a necessarily “safe space” to an inherently “contested” one, I build learning commons that encourage students to interrogate the operations of oppression, privilege, and (cultural) power from a critical race feminist perspective.

Recognizing that classrooms do not exist outside of systems of power and privilege, I incorporate several critical reflection activities that I have used in my past role as an equity, justice, and inclusion administrator. In my “Survey of American Literature” courses, for instance, I have students complete a social identity wheel exercise. The social identity wheel includes categories such as age, ability, class, gender, race, and sexual orientation, among others. I then ask them to write a brief follow-up reflection where they consider aspects of their identities that align with or run counter to, normative categories of social identification. I also complete this exercise and share some of my responses to mirror the accountability, collaboration, and openness I want us to practice in the classroom. In our following class session, I extend our social identity discussion to debates regarding the inclusion of multiethnic literature in the American (read: United Statesian) literary canon. To get us started, I ask students to reflect on the following Toni Morrison quote: “In this country, American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.” We then put this quote in conversation with an assigned excerpt of Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination. This pairing allows us to dissect what it means to render and (re)produce whiteness as race-less and the discursive silences and historical gaps that this racial unconsciousness, as Morrison puts it, produces in our nation’s literature, history, and culture. Moreover, it invites students to consider how literary and cultural workers and those who read, interpret, and assign value (and “universality”) to specific texts, do not exist outside of ideology or systems of power. These “contentious” conversations are, of course, not easy nor comfortable ones to have. Yet the contested classroom invites students to express their thoughts and work through potentially problematic ideas/notions that they have been taught by family and/or society without the anxiety of being reduced to these ideas.

The contested classroom, moreover, invites intellectual exploration and risk-taking. Though I include “traditional” assignments such as literary analysis essays in my courses, I also incorporate collaborative projects that mix traditional and non-traditional forms of research and writing. My assignments, in turn, range from creative podcast projects to collaborative Google mapping projects. By translating their research into public and multimodal mediums, my students consider the significance of making their research accessible to diverse communities, learning to adapt their writing for varying purposes. They also learn to think of themselves as scholars and budding experts on a particular topic. In terms of writing-intensive assignments, I combine guided scaffolded writing tasks with writing workshops and flexible grading policies in order to encourage students to experiment with their writing/ideas, to approach difficult theoretical concepts with curiosity, and openly make mistakes without the fear of being rendered academically inadequate.

The contested classroom, as a site of generative contention, collaboration, and intellectual exploration, makes room for “conflict” without necessarily being reduced to/defined by conflict. Indeed, leaning into “discomfort,” to borrow bell hooks’ phrasing, ultimately allows me to “teach in ways that transform consciousness, creating a climate of free expression that is the essence of a truly liberatory liberal arts education.”