My primary objective as a teacher is to provide students with a critical lens towards Chicano/a Studies so that they may better locate themselves as agents of social change. My approach emphasizes experiential learning, community partnerships, project-based work, and the digital human.

Experiential learning engages students by underscoring connections between theory and practice. Because of my own professionalization within the public humanities, these activities center on providing students with opportunities for primary analysis.  In each of these activities, I ask students to consider the various ways groups have worked to impact the ways we understand cultural identity. Recognizing the production of scholarship as a process with material consequences challenges passive learning approaches to education and can spark debate regarding the stakes involved when making sense of the past, present, and future.
 
I find that community partnerships resonate particularly strongly with students for whom the communities surrounding urban universities more closely represent their own class or ethnic identifications. In my creation of the Building People’s History project, a semester long community partnership intended to bring attention to social movements in south Los Angeles, students became active participants in discussion, stayed after class, and expressed interest in becoming majors. The visible presence of leaders sharing a similar background encouraged them to connect with class materials, take an active role in the discussion, and envision a place for themselves in academic practice.  
 
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 together in small groups 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 assignments using new media. This approach provides Chicano/a Studies majors the opportunity to explore emergent methodologies, build projects with public impact, and curate digital materials to create innovative arguments. More so, it allows us to bring the insights of Chicano/a Studies to this quickly growing field.
 
In closing, as an interdisciplinary scholar trained in comparative Latino/a studies and 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.