TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

Rather than encouraging students to “get” an education, feminist scholar Adrienne Rich entreated them to do something more: to claim their education. While getting an education might require attending class, taking notes, and keeping up with the reading, claiming an education involves active participation in producing (not just consuming) knowledge, commitment to constructive and thoughtful dialogue with colleagues, and most importantly, the mettle to ask difficult questions and learn from mistakes. Rich also recognized that the necessary skills to claim an education are not always offered to students prior to college; the acquisition of these skills is especially vital for historically underrepresented students, since education has been less accessible to those marginalized based on their race, class, gender, sexuality, or disability.

By building the tools to analyze media, power, and cultural history, my courses help students understand how cultural norms of race, class, gender, sexuality, or disability have shifted over time and continue to shape our social experience. The scholarly disciplines of which I am part, Women’s and Gender, Disability, and Media Studies, examine how race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and age impact individual lives, U.S. institutions, policies, social movements, and popular culture. To examine the complex interaction among individuals, societal norms and cultural change, my courses require students to engage with a diverse archive, including film, television, literature, photography, music, newspapers, legal documents, political manifestoes, and medical textbooks, in relation to their own experiences of diverse and intersecting cultural identities. By attending to the ways in which history and culture affect students’ experiences and educational access, I tailor my support and guidance to individual students so that they develop the necessary critical writing and thinking skills, intellectual integrity, community support, and self-confidence to fully claim their educations.

The first goal of my teaching philosophy is to cultivate a sense of intellectual community. I am guided by the belief that students are most engaged and successful when they not only invest in themselves and in the material but also in one another. To accomplish this, I gradually relinquish some of my own authority over the discussion and the materials and shift the responsibility for learning to the students. For example, at the end of every seminar, my students not only choose the final week’s topic but also collaborate to produce an alternative syllabus for the course, complete with readings, writing, and creative assignments. This collaborative intellectual activity accounts for the uniqueness of each class while giving students an intellectual investment in their education. One of my students captured the spirit of this assignment when she remarked, “Building our own syllabus reminds me that I can do my own research, build a reading list, and continue to learn throughout my life.”

To encourage community outreach and support diverse learning styles, I have also designed non-traditional multimodal assignments for experiential learning. For example, my senior seminar, “The Politics of Care,” students collaborate to develop community and self-care activities alongside their reading of theories and histories of care labor, an assignment that enlists student-centered approaches to campus mental health issues while grounding scholarly debates in hands-on learning. Likewise, my “Accessible Date” assignment (http://disabilitysexuality. blogspot.com/) requires students to plan an imaginary date with a wheelchair-using companion using only public transportation to encourage reflection on accessibility, public space, infrastructure, sexuality and privacy. Students publish their experiences and photos on a course blog. Nondisabled students are often surprised by the pervasiveness of inaccessible spaces, while disabled students’ unique lived experiences with the built environment becomes respected expertise. As public pedagogy, this assignment not only has created an entirely student-generated disability archive but also has inspired other instructors throughout the U.S. and Canada to use the assignment. By emphasizing intellectual community, I bring my own passion for collaborative work to the classroom to incite students to become knowledge producers who build, alongside their colleagues, a supportive learning environment based on integrity, respect, intellectual curiosity, and a collective investment in shared learning rather than solely individual achievement.

The second goal of my teaching philosophy is to help students to gain broadly applicable analytical and professional skills that will produce more persuasive, critical, and nuanced writing and thinking. Thus, rather than asking students to find one “right answer,” my assignments encourage students to develop intellectual versatility and their own analytical voice. For instance, in my Introduction to Women’s and Gender Studies, “Primary Document Analysis” papers not only require students to critique a variety of primary documents using theoretical arguments but also teach them to think about the historically specific role of cultural representation in the social construction of gender, sexuality, race, class, and dis/ability. My students have also used Coggle, a collaborative digital mind-mapping tool, to map key trends in scholarly debates on a given topic to visualize convergent methodologies, stakes, and research questions across diverse scholarship. Whenever feasible, I also assign a collaborative, original research project that requires students to combine historical and theoretical approaches make their own argument about a cultural artifact—an assignment that trains students in constructive peer review as well as the creation and utilization of interdisciplinary research. By gaining the necessary skills to deconstruct and critique scholarly arguments within a safe learning environment, I have found that students with diverse personal and political beliefs can engage in trenchant and well-researched dialogue with their peers about controversial issues, and they learn volumes from their respectful disagreements. As students engage with a manifold archive, using new technologies where applicable, they not only gain media and historical literacy but also acquire broadly applicable skills for career-readiness: critical thinking, creative presentation skills, collaborative work experience, and cultural competency.   

As a disability studies scholar, the final core value of my teaching philosophy is to recognize intersectionality and strive for universal accessibility. As a beneficiary of a first-rate state-school education, I am deeply committed to expanding educational opportunities for historically underrepresented groups. First-generation college students, students facing mental health issues, non-white, gender-non-conforming, or impoverished students, among others, face unique educational barriers, and I endeavor to be a committed mentor to them. To do this, on the first day of every one of my courses, my students and I consciously reflect on how our identities, privileges, backgrounds, and experiences shape how we communicate and how we access education. For example, we discuss how oral participation often privileges more assertive and extroverted students, and I offer confidential accommodations for communication differences, such as inviting introverted students to submit questions or prepare a statement before class to minimize anxiety and build confidence. We discuss how gender socialization affects how and how often men and women orally participate. We learn from students of color that describe losing the “privilege of not knowing” when they are constantly told by family members that they must be “twice as good” as their white peers. We then collaboratively develop a shared set of classroom values and rules for discussion. Overall, I have found that transparency about my own intellectual challenges also helps students feel more comfortable expressing their own insecurities, so that they might view their own mistakes and unknowns as learning opportunities to be embraced rather than potential failures to be avoided. Overall, I believe that inviting students to claim their education is the first step in guiding them toward thoughtful and engaged cultural citizenship and the lifelong learning such citizenship entails. 

[1] Adrienne Rich, “Claiming an Education,” 608-611 in Open Questions. eds. Chris Anderson and Lex Runciman. New York: Bedford/St. Martins, 2005.