Guided by an ethic of love and liberation, my teaching centers on the core belief that lived experience is a critical site of knowledge that points the way toward freedom. As I share with students, my approach to teaching is informed by my own lived experiences as a Mexican, Jewish, queer, working-class, first-generation college student. I openly offer these facets of my positionality to invite students to critically reflect on the ways our ethnic, racialized, gendered, and classed bodies exist within larger networks of power. As an educator, I not only guide students to critically interrogate these networks of power but also, most importantly, imagine and enact more liberating relations to one another on a local level. In doing so, I take seriously and align myself with bell hooks’s philosophy of education as freedom in Teaching to Transgress (1994), where she asserts that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy” (12). Teaching across literary studies, race and ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies, I enact this radical possibility by structuring the classroom around three core principles: 1) agency and empowerment, 2) open inquiry and dialogue, and 3) collaboration and community. For the past two years, this approach has earned me student nominations for TCU’s Jean Giles-Sims Feminist Teaching Award, which is typically awarded to full-time faculty.

1) Agency and Empowerment

In my teaching, I adopt an abolitionist imaginary to unsettle and transform the oft-hierarchal classroom space. I consider the roles of teacher and student flexible sites which all members of the classroom embody. In my courses, students co-author class expectations, collaborate on assessment, and regularly lead discussion. When assessing participation, I invite students to reflect on and establish their own scores based on our collectively-defined expectations. While I may adjust scores as needed, this collaborative approach to assessment empowers students to be self-reflective about their class engagement while also providing them the context to help shape the course’s structure. I also empower students to exercise agency as thinkers, writers, and scholars. Rather than reproduce Eurocentric models for language and learning, I invite students to adopt linguistic choices in their writing that are most authentic to their authorship and audiences, including multilingualism, cultural and community dialects, and experimental or creative grammars. Empowering students to write and communicate authentically not only deepens their connection to learning but also structurally transforms the classroom from a site of surveillance and policing to a space of liberation that honors lived experience.

2) Open Inquiry and Dialogue

My teaching is also guided by the belief that students grow from engaging each other’s unique insights and inquiries. While I facilitate student reception of course content through interactive presentations and lectures, student inquiry is the primary catalyst for discussion. In Intro. to Women’s Writing: Radical Women of Color, a section I developed and teach at TCU, students regularly reflect on course readings, pose critical questions for class discussion, and openly share their ideas and insights. As one student writes in their course evaluation: “I loved the open discussions as well as the education that came along with it. Instead of guiding everyone to an answer, people got to hear the perspectives of their classmates.” When open inquiry and dialogue are made central to learning, students are equipped to activate knowledge beyond the classroom. After reading essays on disability justice by Imani Barbarin, for example, students discuss ableist structures on campus and collectively imagine how they can be transformed. In their evaluation of what went well in the course, one student expresses gratitude for “taking the time to not only reflect upon the works of the radical women of color we were to analyze in class but to also stop and pause and consider the injustices that were occurring in the current world around us.” As evidenced here, open inquiry and dialogue equip students to reflect on their relationships to power and privilege at the same time they ignite a meaningful investment in social transformation.

3) Collaboration and Community

Cultivating a collaborative learning community is an equally important tenant of my teaching. On the structural level, I invite student collaboration through mid-semester feedback, where they offer suggestions for improving the course not only after it has ended but also, more importantly, while we are actively in class. Suggestions I have implemented and continue to maintain include facilitating more small group discussions to increase peer engagement, posting class slides for more accessible note-taking, and integrating more short videos in my teaching of core concepts for audio-visual learners. Students also regularly collaborate with one another by reflecting on readings in pairs or small groups, collectively constructing discussion questions, and working together to synthesize and present their ideas in major group projects. For example, in my section of Intro. to Women and Gender Studies, students work in small groups to create and present a collaborative campaign advocating for change on an issue related to gender and sexuality studies at TCU. Activating intersectional feminist theory, students work together to apply what they learned in our course within a real, local context. Guiding students to collectively act on local issues not only affirms their individual capacity to spark change but also models how working together toward shared goals sustains community well beyond the classroom.