Teaching Philosophy

Like my scholarship, my pedagogical practice is guided by the understanding that all students bring their unique funds of knowledge and identity into the classroom. I view my students as individuals with nuanced world views and ways of knowing. With this pedagogical outlook, I strive to make every element of my courses engaging, accessible, and challenging for each student. To build a community of learning and healing in my classrooms, I start my courses by having students write and share an “I am from…” poem, in the style of Beverly Tatum, to learn how students make sense of the world around them and tailor course content that is representative of students’ identities.

In celebrating my students’ lived experiences, I am also guided by mimi khúc’s pedagogy of unwellness: I name the settler colonial, racist, transphobic, and otherwise oppressive systems of domination which govern the lives of myself and my students in order to build classrooms that can heal as much as they educate.

Courses Taught

 

  • Course Number: EAD 965

    Institution: Michigan State University

    Course Description: In the wake of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated anti-Asian xenophobic and racialized violence it ushered in, the state-sanctioned murders of George Floyd, Brionna Taylor, Tony McDade, Elijah McClain, and countless other Black Americans at the hands of police, countless legislative and academic attacks on queer and trans youth, ongoing humanitarian crises at the U.S.-Mexico border and in the U.S. settlement of Puerto Rico, and the continued silencing and erasure of missing and murdered Indigenous women, institutions of higher education in the United States have been met with demands from both their direct constituents and the general public to prioritize “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion.” How institutions (and the actors within them) respond to such calls has varied. Some sought to expand employment opportunities and campus resources for minoritized communities, or to bolster existing DEI initiatives on their campuses. Others worked to expand curricular offerings, declare new institutional status as a minority-serving institution, or reexamine relationships with the university and local law enforcement. Though often postulated as “ideals” for the field, the concepts of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice have also been grounds for local, state, and national policymakers to infringe upon the actions of universities, as we see through widespread calls to dismantle DEI offices and policies at the university level nationally.

     

    What, then, is “diversity” as a concept? How is it employed or weaponized to signal political solidarity or enact political control over the many stakeholders of higher education in the United States? Can the university, the academy, or the profession of academic labor ever truly achieve a justice that reckons with higher education’s complicity in the settler colonization of the lands known as the United States, the erasure of Black, Indigenous, and other Communities of Color, or the enforcement of white supremacist logics of knowledge production and academic rigor? While these questions can never truly be answered, these (and more) shape the framework for this course, which through three “chapters” offers a decolonial, anti-racist, queered approach to understanding the role of postsecondary education in advancing and/or suppressing efforts to enact retributive justice.

    The successful student in this course will be able to:

    • Demonstrate an understanding and application of the concepts related to equity and diversity both inside and outside of U.S. higher education,

    • Develop a critical awareness of one’s positionality and understand one’s positions within these relations of unequal power in the context of higher education,

    • Learn fundamentals of critical theories used in higher education research and praxis (e.g., decolonial theories; Black feminist thought; Critical Race Theory; intersectionality), and

    • Critique, analyze, and complicate contemporary diversity research, theory, practices and policies in U.S. higher education.

  • Course number: EAD 870

    Institution: Michigan State University

    Course description: This course examines major events in the development of colleges and universities in the United States and the philosophical, historical, and social forces that have influenced this development. The course examines contemporary issues in higher education by exploring the intersections of historical, philosophical, and sociological forces that have shaped and continue to shape U.S. higher education, as well as the ways in which higher education has shaped society. International/comparative higher education is also introduced. The course entails course readings and class preparation, take-home exams, a research paper, and an international/comparative higher education exploration.

    At the end of the course, students will:

    1.     Be familiar with the history of U.S. higher education, including its international and colonizing histories 

    2.     Understand how federalism shaped the formation of U.S. higher education, especially related to governance (control) and funding  

    3.     Be able to describe institutional differentiation, its benefits, its limitations, and its unintended consequences 

    4.     Be familiar with key features of U.S. higher education, including the professoriate, tenure, academic freedom, and student affairs

    5.     Be aware of issues currently challenging and/or changing U.S. higher education.

  • Fall 2021; UCLA, LGBTQ Studies (Undergraduate)

    Instructor: Justin A. Gutzwa

    Description: Throughout history, queer and trans communities have been constructed as “deviant others”; through this otherization, queer and trans communities are barred from authoring our own narratives and celebrating the joy of our realities. Nevertheless, queer and trans communities – particularly Black, Indigenous, and other queer Communities of Color – have subverted systemic domination through worldbuilding, community organizing, and imagining queer futurities. In this course, we will explore how queer and trans communities have resisted otherization and built worlds of possibility by (re)claiming authorship of their histories. This class provides a counterhistory of queer and trans identity formation through the lenses of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism, critiques contemporary representations of queer identity in popular media (including film, television, video games, and pop culture), and interrogates strategies queer and trans communities employ to build worlds that disrupt normative oppression through the celebration of queerness.

  • Fall 2021; UCLA, Education (Undergraduate)

    Instructor: Dr. Nicole Mancevice

    Teaching capacity: Teaching Assistant

  • Spring 2020; UCLA, Education (Graduate)

    Instructor: Dr. Cecilia Rios-Aguilar

    Teaching Capacity: Teaching Assistant

  • Spring, 2020; Spring, 2019; UCLA, Education (Graduate)

    Instructor: Dr. Amy Liu

    Teaching Capacity: Teaching Assistant

  • Winter, 2020; UCLA; LGBTQ Studies (Undergraduate)

    Instructor: Dr. Morgan Woolsey

    Teaching Capacity: Teaching Assistant

  • Fall 2019; UCLA, Education (Graduate)

    Instructor: Dr. Sylvia Hurtado

    Teaching Capacity: Teaching Assistant

  • Summer 2019; UCLA, Education (Graduate)

    Instructor: Dr. Linda Sax

    Teaching Capacity: Teaching Assistant