Teaching Philosophy

In my pedagogy, I center collaboration--guiding students to interact with one another to foster a community-based classroom and working toward justice by incorporating culturally relevant approaches to teaching. As Kimberly N. Parker (2022) asserts, “it is important for students and teachers to get to know one another, be vulnerable, heal, and do the hard work to help everyone become a literacy high achiever” through a cultural approach. Through my experience teaching first-year writing and technical communication courses, my practices as an instructor and mentor mirror Parker’s point: I provide the space for individuals to collectively and rhetorically engage, produce, distribute written work centered on social justice and community empowerment through cultural, rhetorical, and professional engagement. 

As a queer, transfemme, non-binary person of color, there are several key components that guide my teaching values and principles which include, intersectional perspectives and collaborative learning. I embody these values as my commitment as an instructor, mentor, and colleague aims to encourage students to become change makers and to support those who they consider their community(ies).

Intersectional Perspectives

As an intersectional person, I have students read and engage with intersectional perspectives as a critical component in the classroom. In WRA 441: Social Justice as Rhetorical Practice, a course I co-taught with Dr. Natasha Jones, we required students to read women of color of feminism as a critical starting point to understand power and oppression. For instance, we read Patricia Hill Collins' work on the matrix of domination to understand the importance of including women of color who have addressed Eurocentric whiteness, and who forefronted their positions as women of color to critique dominant institutionalized structures. This work is vital as it centers epistemological voices that are often excluded in higher education, allowing students to think critically about the social justice work women of color have done within and outside academic institutions.

Collaborative Learning
In addition to providing intersectional perspectives, collaborative learning emerges as a foundational tool in my classroom. For example, in English 2: Reading and Composition, I have students collaborate on a digital project that attends to a relevant contemporary issue, including environmental impacts of the housing crisis and our social issues related to racism and activism. In the assignment, students work with one another and research an issue that impacts their local community(ies). From this project, students do three important things: 1) find articles that discuss their topic which helps establish the exigency for their project; 2) design a digital project (podcast, Spotify playlist etc.) that is manageable to create with their collective members; and 3) tailor their content to be accessible for their communities to understand. The purpose of this project is to signify to students that writing can create actionable change within and outside higher education and support their communities who are unable to access the knowledge that is located within the academy.

Moving Beyond the Academy

Beyond the classroom, my teaching philosophy prompts students to think deeper about their purpose and positionality within an educational institution. I inform students that they possess the power to disrupt and question mainstream narratives, providing them agency to counter those ideas. Through this questioning, students can fully understand their position of power, learning to rhetorically think about the implications of harmful discourses, while becoming aware about systematic oppression that impacts disempowered communities. Through this work, I empower students to examine discourses that not only align with their interests and identities, but I guide them to understand that their writing and voice can evoke civic change in the world and within institutional structures, which includes higher education. Furthermore, I urge students to grapple with positionality, power, and privilege and learn that affordances and disaffordances of what types of knowledges are included and excluded within the academy.