Teaching

 I deeply respect the urgent challenge of teaching, as a practice of getting free.  bell hooks’ respect for reflection and healing as a form of challenging injustice and imagining freedom inspires me to bring more of myself to my teaching and learning.  I welcome students as humans with dignity, histories, and perspectives and together we create a “contact zone” (de Sousa Santos 2018) for grappling with different forms and positions of knowing.  This grappling process is demanding for each of us personally and intellectually as we face the limits in different ways of knowing and as we articulate our own contributions to systems of oppression, as well as our responsibilities for creating a praxis of healing and liberation.  I see my job as providing a space and the critical interactions with texts, film, poems and other forms of representation which fosters an opening for struggle and imagination.

 I assist students in considering relations of power, voice, identities, and access.  I design my classes to encourage students to notice the implications of different stances on children’s and youth’s lives—what gets named as well as what (or who) gets left out. I do this through diverse methods including scholarly readings, youth writings and poetry, whole group and small group discussions, documentary films, guest presenters, collaborative creative presentations, the creation of online hashtag syllabi, and writing prompts that require critical analysis and comparison across texts.  Moreover, I create learning environments that extend beyond the classroom and that connect scholarly learning with experiential dimensions and civic engagement.

 I have designed currently teach the following courses:

• Youth Identities (undergrad and graduate)

• Urban Education (undergrad and graduate)

• Gender & Education (undergrad)

• Interpretive Methods

• Proseminar in Sociocultural Childhood Studies

I am happy to share syllabi and please contact me if you are interested in my course materials.