teaching
philosophy

I encourage students to name and articulate the relationships between their personal and professional experiences in schools, critical theory, and educational research.

I strive to model engaged, critical pedagogy focused on issues of educational justice, planning lessons and assignments that require students to examine their often taken-for-granted assumptions about educational inequality.

On the very first day of class, I often ask students to look carefully at our course syllabus and consider what the text tells them about the nature of schooling in our society. As we discuss grades and assignments, I explain that while this class will involve hard work, I don’t want any of us to forget that “doing work” is not necessarily the same as learning. Rather, my goal is to build a caring community in which we take risks and read both the word and the world together.