STATEMENT OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
Accessibility / Inclusivity / Affirmation
I have taught art education, art appreciation, studio art, and art history survey courses since 2008 with foci on equity, diversity, inclusion, and access; contemporary art and visual culture, and digital technology. My research and pedagogy are guided by Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity and precarity in conversation with Julia Serano’s discussion of oppositional sexism. Additionally, my teaching is influenced by the critical pedagogies of Paolo Friere and bell hooks and critical methodologies. Technology, its theories and application, and in particular emerging digital technologies (e.g., social media), play a prominent role in my research and teaching practice.
My teaching is shaped in part by my own educational experiences as a high school dropout who attended college as a first-generation working part-time student who endured discrimination and harassment based on gender identity and expression as well as sexuality. My practice is also shaped by more than 13 years’ experience teaching on the campuses of two large urban community college districts that predominantly serve Latinx and Black communities located in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas metropolitan area.
The students I taught at the community colleges often thought they had little to offer academically because their formal educational backgrounds had gaps or had been interrupted for various reasons, and standard academic assessment tools tend to reinforce a sense, and stigma, of deficit. I quickly realized I had to alter my teaching to an asset-based model and design better ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge when the fear of traditional assessment methods led to assignment avoidance, which earned them zeroes that severely affected their grades. For example, many first-year students would not perform the district-mandated museum artwork critique paper due to their writing ability levels. I therefore reinterpreted the delivery method for a paper to allow students the option to perform the assignment as a narrated video in the style of the Khan Academy’s Smarthistory series. I worked with students as they recorded video on their phones at the museums, discussing artworks with each other as they answered the same assignment prompts as their classmates who chose the written paper option.
My teaching is shaped in part by my own educational experiences as a high school dropout who attended college as a first-generation working part-time student who endured discrimination and harassment based on gender identity and expression as well as sexuality. My practice is also shaped by more than 13 years’ experience teaching on the campuses of two large urban community college districts that predominantly serve Latinx and Black communities located in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas metropolitan area.
The students I taught at the community colleges often thought they had little to offer academically because their formal educational backgrounds had gaps or had been interrupted for various reasons, and standard academic assessment tools tend to reinforce a sense, and stigma, of deficit. I quickly realized I had to alter my teaching to an asset-based model and design better ways for students to demonstrate their knowledge when the fear of traditional assessment methods led to assignment avoidance, which earned them zeroes that severely affected their grades. For example, many first-year students would not perform the district-mandated museum artwork critique paper due to their writing ability levels. I therefore reinterpreted the delivery method for a paper to allow students the option to perform the assignment as a narrated video in the style of the Khan Academy’s Smarthistory series. I worked with students as they recorded video on their phones at the museums, discussing artworks with each other as they answered the same assignment prompts as their classmates who chose the written paper option.
I teach art education preservice undergraduate courses currently at Texas State University and taught previously at Penn State University. In all of my courses, my goal is for students to critically examine their lives and experiences and that of their peers as well as future students, through/within the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and other constructed identities.
In my courses, we analyze these subjectivities through multiple theoretical lenses, e.g., visual culture and critical pedagogy. The objective is to explore histories, past and present, in which non-dominant groups, e.g., LGBTQ+ communities, people of color, people with disabilities, and working-class groups have been and continue to be devalued under present systems of power. We explore how these groups have been represented; but most importantly, how they represent themselves in counterhegemonic narratives in various fields for example, in literature, film, visual culture, research, and art. My goal is to help students understand and analyze pressing issues faced by marginalized groups in contemporary times, for example, poverty; lack of opportunities; violence based on race, sexual orientation, and gender identity; and intellectual colonialism. |
Based on my experience awaiting assignment for jury duty, this video looks at some cultural assumptions made that include one's ability to reason and what that says about power and the framing of knowledge production.
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Through these explorations, students are encouraged to become critical thinkers to analyze how knowledge and power is embedded and affirmed through social institutions in a given society, and how that power is mediated and impacts people’s lives. Moreover, the goal is to create pedagogical possibilities in which students can negotiate meanings and create potential strategies for change that can be applied toward social equity.
My class structures are varied and include discussion, student and teacher presentations, group work, written responses; attending museum events, gallery exhibitions and campus presentations; screening films, and being involved in community awareness/activism. In conclusion, my classes are intended to facilitate a critical reflective approach to thinking concerned with the betterment of people’s lives that students will take into their classrooms as they begin, or continue, to teach.
My class structures are varied and include discussion, student and teacher presentations, group work, written responses; attending museum events, gallery exhibitions and campus presentations; screening films, and being involved in community awareness/activism. In conclusion, my classes are intended to facilitate a critical reflective approach to thinking concerned with the betterment of people’s lives that students will take into their classrooms as they begin, or continue, to teach.
Click here to play "Introducing Zoe," an interactive multimodal story created as part of trans-affirming curricula I design with Adetty Pérez de Miles.