My approach to teaching is to select delicious texts to read together, and to create compelling assignments in which students synthesize and make meaning. Reading and writing are core modes of learning in my teaching, but class assignments take many shapes. In the classroom and in academe, I believe that "playing devil's advocate" is overrated.

Overview

My teaching is inspired by the teaching and writings of Myles Horton, Audre Lorde, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Greg Dimitriadis and bell hooks. These authors have mentored me in the importance of narrative, situatedness, generosity, and attentive writing and listening in learning. My teaching is also informed by critical works by Gloria Anzaldúa, Gerald Vizenor, Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and Vine Deloria. These authors have encouraged me to engage in teaching that is marked by a critical interrogation of oppression, and the promotion of different ways of knowing that have persisted in diverse communities. I operate within an anti-racist, anti-homophobic, anti-misogynist, anti-ableist pedagogy, holding space for multiple identities and multiple abilities and languages. I do this with a lot of care, but also with an underlying firmness.

Pedagogy

My classroom pedagogy relies upon peer review and collaboration, scaffolding course assignments, frequent writing exercises, and providing students with strategies for engaging course readings. My approach is to bring students into some of the most important debates in a discipline, and then show them how the various sides of the debates are rooted in history, philosophy and theory, structural inequities, and power differentials. I design assignments that parallel the kinds of writing that scholars actually do, and design syllabi around readings that are informative, provocative, and beautifully composed.

I use multiple modes of learning in different combinations of individual, small group, and large group work. I design learning spaces to be deeply participatory and project-based. Usually, I use a mix of low-stakes (formative) assignments and formal (summative) assignments to organize a course. The low-stakes assignments emphasize important course concepts, and provide students with multiple opportunities to try on new ideas, and new formulations. Summative assignments challenge students to bring together course ideas in increasingly sophisticated ways.

As a facilitator, I always work to open up closed or shrinking spaces of conversation, to push students to ask difficult questions of themselves and society. My approach is to hold very high expectations, but also be an encouraging place to land when students try on new and challenging ideas.

Teaching philosophy

As a participatory action researcher and Indigenous scholar, my teaching, research, and scholarly writing are interconnected. Each reflects a collaborative spirit of co-constructing knowledge. My philosophy of teaching is defined by my commitment to thoughtful, relevant, engaged pedagogy; my commitment to writing as a way of knowing; and my commitment to rigorous interdisciplinary scholarship. I know that students come to the university classroom with multiple, complicated histories with writing and learning. The classroom and the course readings and assignments need to be big enough to meet students where they are, but also complex enough to motivate students to try on new approaches, new words, new interpretations, new meanings. I try to create my courses to demonstrate a transparency of practice—often engaging in meta-conversations with students about why a particular decision or activity or reading at a particular time. I do this so that students can participate in the rationale of the course.

As a teacher, I am curious about theory, with wide and deep interest in Indigenous theory, decolonizing theory, critical race theory, spatial theory, queer theory, feminist theory, and theories of participation, to name just a handful from an always growing list. I apply this curiosity and these theories to the field of social justice education in order to anchor and extend it, but perhaps more importantly, to understand the relationships between policy and lived lives, between politics and power, and philosophy and possibility.

Courses Developed in the Department of Social Justice Education, OISE, University of Toronto (2015-2024)

Decolonization, Settler Colonialism, and Anti-Blackness

This course examines settler colonialism and anti-Blackness as entwined historical and contemporary social structures.  Appraises lived consequences for Indigenous peoples, Black peoples, European settlers, and other arrivals.  Considers theories of decolonization and abolition within settler colonial contexts.

Indigenous Land Education and Black Geographies

This course attends to research approaches coming out of two distinct literatures: Indigenous land education or pedagogy, and Black feminist geographies. Texts and assignments will focus on empirical and conceptual research projects which can be informed by critical Indigenous studies and Black studies engaging place and land. This is not a course that attempts to put these literatures into a comparative relation, or discursive relation. None of the assignments as you to compare these literatures. The assignments don’t ask you to translate these literatures into each other, or fit them into a universal view that makes them somehow fit together. In fact, the major ethical and intellectual imperative—one that is perhaps difficult to achieve is the only regard for Indigenous thought and Black thought is from within a multicultural perspective—is to resist trying to make these literatures exist on anything but their own terms.

Participatory Action Research and Community Based Research

This course engages participatory research approaches as an important intervention to the politics of knowledge and knowing that otherwise typify academic knowledge production. It considers the settler colonial harms of research alongside the resistance and refusals by communities to allow such harms to continue. Course readings and assignments are designed to support students in crafting meaningful forms of participation in a wide array of social science and humanities approaches to inquiry.

Advanced Indigenous Feminist Research

This course engages Indigenous feminist approaches to research, and the application of theories of refusal to academic knowledge production.

Special Topics: Interviews and Focus Groups

Centered in readings in Indigenous Studies, Black Studies, Queer Studies, and Critical Qualitative Research, this course will discuss research ethics, qualitative methods, and approaches to data analysis. This course provides the opportunity to learn about, reflect upon, and plan qualitative interviews and focus groups that are generative and non-exploitative. Interviews and focus groups are understood as meaning-making and co-theorizing activities. In the approach at the heart of this course, researchers bring their questions very directly and explicitly to their conversations with participants, rather than holding them away or masking them.

Courses Developed at State University of New York at New Paltz (2008-2015)

Urban Education

This course examines intersections of cultural, racial, ethnic, and socio-economic realities related to schooling and out-of-school time education in cities.  Our work will utilize structural analyses, emphasizing implications for policy and institutions.  Together we will analyze issues of access and quality as impacted by scale and limited resources.  This course engages urban settings as providing unique challenges and rich possibilities. This course will identify and investigate timely themes in the field of urban education.  The issue-based approach this course will allow students to understand the relationships between the politics of urban education, urban educational policy, urban school operations, and urban classroom practices.  Because the course is housed at SUNY New Paltz, it will emphasize the particular features of education in small cities—that is, cities that do not operate as metropoles, such as those in the Hudson Valley. Students will interpret the ways in which urban educational issues are framed by elected officials, school administrators, educators, students, families, and popular media.

Current Issues in Education

This course explores current issues in public education in the United States, the context from which they emerge, and their possible resolution. This course will identify and investigate timely themes in the fields of education and secondary schooling.  These poly-vocal fields are far from coherent, and can be characterized by disagreement about the real and purported aims of schooling, the work of classrooms and teachers, the interactions between schools and society, the economics of schooling, and what it means to engage in “public” schooling. In this course, we will utilize news sources, scholarly articles, and book-length texts to examine the controversies and tensions, competing viewpoints, historical and contemporary contexts, and potential interventions to issues that typify schooling in the United States, right now. 

Indigenous Ways of Knowing

Discussions and texts will introduce students to indigenous perspectives on contemporary social issues, global Indigenous knowledge systems, and Indigenous critiques of Western thought.  Although Indigenous people around the globe have been the subjects of much anthropological, ethnographic, and social science research, Indigenous social and political thought remains mostly misunderstood, undervalued, and misappropriated by Western philosophers.  Still, Indigenous thinkers have insisted that their contributions be heard, and be understood within their own cosmologies.  Their work has pushed the boundaries of Native intellectualism, while also pushing back against Western traditions of thought that are over-determined by neoliberalism and global capitalism.  In this course, we will read from Indigenous authors on a series of contemporary social issues.

Introduction to Native American Studies

(Written but not taught)

Discussions and texts will introduce students to the field of Native American Studies and theories on settler colonialism.  Topics include Native American cultures, places, epistemologies, and philosophies, and Indigenous sovereignty, history, and law. Crow Creek Lakota scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn describes the discipline of Native American Studies as the “endogenous” study of First Nation cultures and history,” (1997, p. 11).  By this she means that the field is driven by contributions by Indigenous authors and thinkers, making central the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous peoples, and the knowledge of Indigenous languages, places, and historical accounts. This course will introduce you to Native American Studies as an interdisciplinary field that draws upon academic disciplines including ethnic studies, history, art history, anthropology, education (and others) while attending to works by tribes and Indigenous scholars, activists, and advocates that engage, critique, and re-imagine those disciplines. Native American Studies recognizes Indigenous peoples as having long histories in specific places, and as thriving, contemporary peoples with long futures.  As a discipline, it challenges narratives in which Native and Indigenous peoples are cast as disappearing or extinct.  Thus, this course recognizes Indigenous peoples as diverse, 21st century peoples.

Research On and With Indigenous Peoples

(Written but not taught)

Immerses students in the history of research on Native Americans and Indigenous peoples, the co-emergence of scholarly disciplines and nation-states, and ethical issues past and present.  New approaches to make research more culturally relevant and responsive to Native Americans will be featured.  In Decolonizing Methodologies (1999, 2013) Linda Tuhiwai Smith explains that for many Indigenous communities, research has been a “dirty” word.  This is because Native American and Indigenous communities have been exploited in the name of research.  Researchers and scientists have entered Native American and Indigenous communities and extracted biological samples, cultural artifacts, sacred stories, and medicinal plants.  They have performed experimental medical procedures, misrepresented their true intentions, and mishandled valuable ideas and items.  They have made false promises, and have used their research to tell stories about Native American and Indigenous communities that undermine community aspirations. Unethical dealings with Native Americans and Indigenous peoples are the widely recognized facts of the origins of several disciplines and the starting points several empirical methods. This course will introduce you to the history of research on Native Americans and Indigenous peoples around the globe.  As course authors explain, unethical research was not just accidental, but was the result of the perspectives and goals that researchers brought to their work.  We will examine how this history shaped what are now widely accepted research practices, and contributed to the creation of ethical guidelines and frameworks that now typify academic research.

Native American Science and Literacy

(Co-Developed with Jule Gorlewski, written but not taught)

Introduces students to Native American education models and knowledge systems, foundations and practices of science and literacy learning.  Elaborates connections between scientific and literacy-based understandings within Native American educational frameworks.  In many Western educational frameworks, science and literacy are treated as separate domains of knowledge and learning. This is not the case in many Native American and Indigenous educational frameworks. In fact, scientific knowledge and literacy knowledge are integrated into one another, and into other aspects of learning and meaning-making within Indigenous educational settings. This course introduces students to the history and foundations of Native American education, a history that has co-existed and persisted even in the face of outright attempts to assimilate and colonize Native American children through public schooling and boarding schools. Students will engage Native American education models, Indigenous knowledge systems, and Indigenous epistemologies in order to understand the constructions of science and literacy in Native American formal and in-formal educational settings. This course facilitates investigation of how implicit cultural assumptions, frames of reference, perspectives and biases within a discipline influence how knowledge is constructed and how constructions of knowledge affect experiences of teaching and learning.