approach to teaching

teaching philosophy

Teaching, and the politics of education is a central focus of not just my work, but my ethic and worldview, with the ways that learning is conceived of and enacted shaping the way that I live and do scholarship. Making space for positive classroom spaces, working to bring futures of education that are more liberatory and inclusive into being, and encouraging all students, particularly those from diverse and non-traditional backgrounds to navigate what learning can mean for them forms the core of the work that I do.

My approach to teaching is one that is built from a foundation of the recognition of the classroom space as just one sliver of the rich and dynamic lives my students lead. Recognizing my students as fully rounded people with expansive lives, of which their academic work is just one part, shifts the entire way that I enter the classroom, seeing it as just one stopping point on their learning journey. This takes the pressure off of the assignments for the course as 'the' most important thing and seeing the classroom within the broader context of rich lived experience allows me to resist the pressure to see academics as the be all end all, and instead to move towards supporting my students in broader ways. Therefore, accommodations, compassion, and understanding are not scarce resources that students must prove themselves to get, but freely given and ultimately crucial to their learning. By seeing my students as people, they see me as a person too, and that rapport allows us to co-create a classroom space together that understands learning and academia as inherently uncomfortable and pressurized, and therefore move towards making the most of what we can in the institution.

I am dedicated to student-led learning journeys, and believe strongly in the classroom as a shared space to explore material, with my role as an educator being to enter the vulnerable space of learning with the students. I design my classes for student success by recognizing that success for each of my students may mean something entirely different to them than what is traditionally defined as success in the academy. By holding space for the students to define what success looks like, I am able to more specifically tailor class specific and external resources to meet those goals, ultimately leading to an improved learning experience, and thus stronger learning outcomes. I work to connect my students with external resources such as librarians and writing- centres to help them learn to navigate what they might need and self-advocate for their learning. When possible, I also design nested, or scaffolded assignments and build in accountability and learning checks to ensure student progress.

By moving away from the idea that education, learning, accommodations, and access are things to be earned, I orient my teaching instead towards building a classroom space that facilitates curiosity, rapport and respect, and genuine connection with the material and each other. Moving away from suspicion and punitive thinking and towards trust, compassion, and an understanding of learning resources and curiosity as abundant, rather than falsely scarce, allows for greater student empowerment, and often more intentional engagement in the course. This is crucial, as the subjects I teach are exceptionally relevant to students lives. Resultantly, not only do I work to include an intersectional lens in what arrives on the syllabus or in my lesson plans, but I actively recognize the lived realities of my students in my classroom and work with them to relate what they learn to the context of their own lives. As these processes of understanding how theory or course content by interact with, reflect, or depart from their own experiences can be emotionally taxing, especially in a group setting, working to engage students with trust and care is crucial.

Ultimately, by 1) creating positive classroom spaces, 2) building genuine rapport, and 3) creating specific and engaging learning practices, I facilitate positive student learning experiences through an ethos of mutual care. In this way, student success, and by extension good teaching, becomes not just a state of achievement that one can meet in a linear sense, but an action, an orientation, and an expression of relationality.