Teaching Statement

Teaching Statement

As an educator, I aim to demonstrate to students how they can mobilize ethnographic methods and frameworks to critically view and understand the world around them. I like to start my classes by analyzing media materials related to the class that students are assigned to bring in. I find that students feel more engaged when they are asked to apply course materials to media they encounter in their normal lives, and this activity encourages students to share their opinions, converse with their classmates, and learn from each other. In class surveys administered during the middle of the semester, many of my students have expressed that their favorite assignment is the media presentation, as it helps them further understand the assigned readings and realize how certain theries and frameworks are applicable to their own lives. I hope to use these strategies, as well as a reflective pedagogical practice, in the future as I gain more teaching experience.

In 2022, I taught in the Duke Pre-College program, an initiative that serves high school students and equips them with skills that will help them transition to college educational spaces. In my self-designed course, “Media Literacy and Identity,” I helped students learn how to critically analyze different media, including film, art, social media posts, and music. In course evaluations, students overwhelmingly found the material to be engaging, the creative class assignments (like creating a Tiktok video as a group), and the course readings to be engaging and helpful for their college preparedness. 

During the fall of 2023, I served as a Teaching Assistant for Dr. Harris Solomon’s "Medical Anthropology" class in the anthropology department. Students indicated to me, both in person and in their course evaluations, that they appreciated the extensive feedback I gave them on their written assignments. Several students in the class remarked that they felt their writing skills improved due to the encouraging yet critical evaluations I gave their individual work. While I served as a TA, I participated in the Preparing Future Faculty program, and attended insightful classes for the Certificate in College Teaching (CCT). In both spaces, I was better able to understand various pedagogical approaches that I use in the classroom presently. 

In the Spring of 2024, I served as the Teaching Assistant for Dr. Mark Anthony Neal’s #Black Popular Culture course in African and African American Studies (AAAS). I largely assisted students with their critical inquiry, and also supported the production of a collaborative final project in which the students created their own episode for Left of Black. Simultaneously, I taught the "Introduction to African American Studies" course as the instructor of record for the AAAS department. Using my multi-modal training, I framed my classes around different articulations of the major ideas in Black studies discourse by incorporating image-rich PowerPoint presentations, surveys, music videos, film clips, interviews, and both visual and sonic artwork. My students produced stunning final projects, some of which took the form of a traditional paper, while others turned to creative media like digital art galleries accompanied by a one-page reflexive statement. I have used this approach in my current classes at Mount Holyoke College, where I have also begun to hone an assets-based philosophy to my pedagogy. 

During the Fall of 2024, I taught two courses at Mount Holyoke: “Black Ethnographers” and “Representing Race,” and in the Spring of 2025 I will teach “Introduction to Anthropology.” I value the empirical and experiential knowledge that students bring with them to the classroom. Specifically, I have witnessed students in my “Black Ethnographers” class present insightful, critical, and, at times, deeply personal material in their oral presentations. Students have discussed impactful interactions with art installations, analyzed how the prison-industrial complex has affected their own families, and explored the impact of Black superheroes on mainstream American understandings of Black communities. I have also been fortunate to witness the growth of students’ media literacy in my “Representing Race” class, where we think expansively about how to ethically represent people’s lived experiences through audio-visual media. Students responded well to my creative pedagogies inspired by Lynda Berry and Felicia Rose Chavez, and honed their analytical skills through close readings of a variety of texts, including Hamdy and Nye’s Lissa (2017) and Laurence Ralph’s New Tork Times Op Doc, “The Scars of Being Policed While Black” (2020).

My syllabi complement important, foundational texts, with contemporary expansions/problematizing of these texts, via studies of documentary films, social media posts, newspaper articles, visual art, performances, and other multi-modal materials that encourage students to engage with the material in new or different ways. Additionally, I am attuned to how neuro-atypical students might engage with the class materials, and therefore integrate tools like Slido and digital word clouds, where students can digitally participate in live time. In preparing for my classes, I use a backward course design approach, centering my pedagogical methods and course structure around student learning. I strive to help my students walk away from the class with a final project that is useful to them, be it the beginnings of a podcast, a paper that can be submitted for publication, or a website that delves into their creative and extra-academic interests. Producing multi-media projects not only keeps students engaged, but also helps them to realize that they can make intellectual contributions of their own as impactful knowledge producers. 

I am excited to provide diverse curricula offerings and to encouraging students to engage with a wide range of media and scholarly thinkers. For the past few years, I have been working with Dr. Mark Anthony Neal on his longstanding YouTube series, Left of Black, not only as the social media coordinator, but also as a producer. In 2023, I hosted an episode that featured Dr. Naomi André, a scholar whose research falls at the intersection of musicology and Black Studies. During my conversation with Dr. André, we explored the importance of celebrating Black feminist intellectual and artistic contributions, emphasized the global influence of Black performance practices on music, and recognized the outstanding work being done by other women of color in academia. It was exciting to invite both established and burgeoning scholars working in all avenues of Black Studies to share their work on the Left of Black platform. I hope to continue celebrating the work of other minoritized scholars to perform reparative work within the academy and to further expand educational opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students throughout the social sciences and humanities.

My pedagogical mission is to help students train their analytical sensibilities, develop their interpretational skills, and critically engage with complex social, cultural, and historical contexts. By encouraging them to question the power dynamics embedded in visual and material culture, I aim to cultivate a classroom environment where students can think critically and empathetically. My hope is that any student who takes a class with me will come away with a heightened sensitivity to the politics of the visual and material world, as well as an awareness of how these politics shape our lived experiences. While conversations like these can be challenging, I firmly believe they are essential for fostering meaningful intellectual growth and creating opportunities for transformation in students' lives.