Pedagogical Portfolio
My primary objective as a teacher is to provide students with a critical lens towards Chican@ Studies so that they may better locate themselves as agents of social change. My approach emphasizes experiential learning, project-based work, and the digital humanities.
Experiential learning underscores connections between theory and practice. These activities center on primary analysis of documents and media, as well as data collection through photography, field visits, and interviews. In experiential learning modules, I invite students to consider the various ways diverse groups have worked to impact the ways we understand cultural identity. Recognizing the production of scholarship as a process with material consequences on communities challenges passive learning approaches to education and can spark debate regarding the stakes involved when making sense of the past, present, and future.
When designing project-based assignments, I draw upon my experience in the public humanities. Ideal for junior and senior seminars, I ask students to work collaboratively towards the shared goal of rendering the questions, perspectives, and stories of ethnic studies socially meaningful. Doing so helps them hone a sense of self-awareness and accountability as social agents whose ideas and actions affect others.
In my upper division course, I integrate content and methods from the digital humanities. This approach provides Chicana/o Studies majors the opportunity to explore emergent technologies, build projects with public impact, and curate digital materials to create innovative arguments using multimedia sources. More so, it allows us to bring the insights of Chicano/a Studies to this quickly growing field.
As an interdisciplinary scholar trained in American Studies and Ethnicity who is committed to the public/digital humanities, I seek to make the classroom meaningful to students by applying its lessons to our contemporary landscape. It is my goal to realize visions of praxis in the local times and places of people’s lives, both within and beyond the classroom.