Teaching Philosophy & Approach

My formal views on teaching, learning, and everything in between have been shaped by educators and activists whose pedagogy blurred the lines between research and praxis (bell hooks, Sara Ahmed, Gayatri Spivak, and Stuart Hall). Through the years, their words have become what Sara Ahmed calls ‘companion texts’ that function as homing devices. Their words serve as reminders to interrogate how my experiences as a student influence(d) my identity, positionalities, and the various ways I had been and still am being constructed by forces out of my control. It is from this space I build my teaching philosophy.

Stuart Hall spoke directly to my multiple identities, past and present. He spoke directly to the struggling 13-year-old growing up in British Hong Kong whose differences screamed louder than her voice. He also spoke to the frustrated middle school English teacher who struggled to help her students unlearn the lessons life had taught them about who they were and where they belonged. His words serve to remind me that students, regardless of their caste and class positions, bring with them a backpack full of experiences that have constructed and positioned them as particular types of learners and people. Gayatri Spivak urged me to enter into a lifelong practice of hyper self-reflexivity by continuously interrogating my multiple identities and positionalities to see the ways in which I am or might become complicit in Western knowledge production.

Approach to Teaching

My teaching practice is grounded in a multi-pedagogical approach that draws from Black Feminist and British cultural studies pedagogies. These approaches are both culturally sustaining and critically engaged and privilege the notion of experience in the classroom.

Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy.

My experiences as a student in British Hong Kong and as a middle school English teacher in Chester, PA (USA), have informed my commitment to the practice of culturally sustaining pedagogy, where I center and honor the cultural histories and lived experiences that students bring to my classroom; a practice that is also informed by the understanding that my cultural ways of knowing and being are a deeply rooted part of my personal, intellectual, and academic identities. When designing the syllabus, gathering my intentions, curating the reading material, and planning in-class activities and student deliverables, I will look for every opportunity to:

• privilege the notion of cultural understandings and experiences that students bring to their learning and sense-making – interpretations and analysis- through reading the course materials.
• recognize the influence of culture in how a student participates in class discussions and, therefore, provide a variety of activities through which they can demonstrate their learning.

As an educator, I invite my students to draw on their prior knowledge and experiences while engaging them in learning activities that are challenging, interactive, and relevant to our societal context. I strive to create educational environments that are equitable, collaborative, and empowering for my students. I am intentional, thoughtful, creative, and responsive to their cultural and academic needs and diverse learning abilities. When working with students, I draw on various multimodal texts, including theoretical and literary works, research, podcasts, art, media, and popular cultural texts to aid in their engagement with the course content.

I recently created a culturally relevant and responsive syllabus for a qualitative research course I taught in Baku, Azerbaijan, at the Azerbaijan State Pedagogical University. While curating the reading materials and planning in-class activities and student deliverables, I tried to privilege the notion of cultural understandings and experiences that students bring to their learning. I recognized and supported students’ culturally, socially, and historically informed participation structures and provided a variety of activities through which they could demonstrate their learning. I also included extra background resources, such as videos, podcasts, and other multimodal resources that made information available in Azerbaijani and English that might help students of different learning styles make sense of the course materials.

Critical Pedagogy:

As an interdisciplinary research methodologist, I ascribe to the model of critical pedagogy offered by British cultural studies, which insists on the inclusion of a research component (formal and informal) in all course material.  Informed by this model of pedagogy, I plan to include a research component in all theory and content courses. The end goal of this inclusion is to incorporate research as an intrinsic part of thinking critically about knowledge, including a research component where students will learn how to ask questions, locate the information (data) and read (analyze and interpret) texts to find answers to the questions generated through their engagement with the course material.

Teaching Strategies

Reflection Journal: This assignment is ******designed to foster students’ development as critical thinkers who ask questions, create informed arguments, and develop a standpoint from which to read and interpret cultural texts beyond the course readings. It creates a space where students can think through, ask questions about the readings and class discussions, and develop their understandings in a safe environment. Here, I can engage in one-on-one conversations with the students regarding the course materials and their journeys in the course and beyond. Additionally, through carefully curated journal prompts, I encourage students to practice and develop a reflexive practice and draw on their life experiences as they engage with the course readings and class discussions. This journal assignment is intended to help students form a standpoint, voice, and opinions shaped not just by course content but also by life experiences that are frequently overlooked in the educational journey.

I have used this approach in my research methods class, where the journal was designed to encourage the practice of writing reflective, analytical memos. The fieldwork journal created a structured yet flexible space for students to document their immediate thoughts, reactions, and concerns regarding the course materials—theories, paradigms, and complex concepts such as ontology and epistemology. I also included weekly prompts called ‘pause and reflect,’ which invited students to reflect upon their reasons for choosing their study questions, populations of interest, and their reasons for undertaking their particular research project.

Activity-based Learning:  Activities (graded and non-graded) to learn by ‘doing’ where students are introduced to the benefits of working collaboratively to try to make sense of the writing and language of theory, or of key arguments and interventions introduced through the readings. One such example is an activity in the format of the Socratic seminar, designed to familiarize students with the practice of facilitating academic conversations.[1] In this case, students are tasked with opening up a conversation by posing questions to the rest of the class and inviting them to collectively make sense of the reading. To scaffold their success, the students will be given specific guidelines to help structure their presentation including suggestions of potential entry points for discussion.

An Idea for a Future Course

Edward Said’s World.

In this course, I would spend time with my students reading Edward Said's Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism, and a collection of his essays, in particular, The World, The Text, and the Critic. During our time together, I would use reflection journals and class discussions to encourage students to connect deeply with his ideas and listen to his voice—the grain of his voice[2], the purpose of his voice, and his insistence on opening up new spaces for new voices—spaces of enunciation. These conversations with Said through thoughtfully curated passages that contain his ideas on how intellectuals can interrupt theoretical discourses by questioning received ideas, reading against the grain, and participating in intellectual action can be the catalyst required to develop an understanding of their role in the interpretation and analysis of literature—the lives and experiences they contain—as producers of knowledge—scholars, writers, narrators—who can, in Said's words, "think concretely, sympathetically, and contrapuntally about others[3]” in and through their scholarship.