Teaching

Since 2012, I have taught undergraduate and graduate students with an aim to develop ways of knowing, being and doing for social change.

Teaching Philosophy

Chicana feminist scholar of cultural studies and queer theory Gloria E. Anzaldúa wrote in an essay in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color that “I believe that, by changing ourselves, we change the world, that traveling El Mundo’s Zurdo path is the path of a two-way movement – a going deep into the self, and an expanding out into the world a simultaneous recreation of the self and a reconstruction of society.”

I consistently work toward this two-way movement in my classroom, which I hypothesize will result in a transformative experience for my students. The classroom experiences I create are rooted in a philosophy that challenges and resists the “banking concept of education,” a phrase coined by Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

Furthermore, I’m inspired by bell hooks’ writings on teaching, in which she describes education as the practice of freedom. As a result of this teaching philosophy, I was nominated by students and awarded “Professor of the Year” in my first year of teaching at NYU Wagner in May 2023.

My classroom teaching is situated on these four pedagogical imperatives:

Learning Partnership

Employ Freire’s “teachers as learners and learners as teachers” philosophy because learning is an exchange 

Positioning Lived Experience

Situate course learning from the student’s lived experiences

Prefiguring Change

Make ample space and time for reflection and action or praxis so that learning is contextual and applied for action and change

Reflexive Practice

Engage students routinely in a critical and self-reflexive practice to inspire change-seeking behaviors and actions

Teaching

Students who have taken my courses, from Critical Theory and Social Justice in the City to Leadership and Social Transformation and many others in between, have engaged in the study of self and society through feminist and critical theory epistemologies. 

Current Courses

  • This is an introductory course for students who want to better understand theories, principles, and methods of community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), which is research done with communities and community partners. CBPAR is a means for community planning and organizing to address local issues and social needs that center individuals and communities directly impacted. This course focuses on how researchers and community members collaborate to conduct research that leads to community change and the improvement of community-identified needs as well as scholarly debates, and practical and methodological issues in the application of CBPAR.

  • The course explores the role of leadership in organizational efforts to change thinking, systems, and policies—taking into consideration the contested process by which the responsibility of addressing intractable problems is distributed among key diverse actors in a shared-power world. Emergent perspectives reveal leadership as the collective achievement of members of a group who share a vision, and who must navigate the constellation of relationships, structures, processes and institutional dynamics within the larger system in which they are embedded.

  • Management and Leadership is designed to empower you with the skills you will need to make meaningful change in the world—whether you care about education, criminal justice, prenatal care, urban planning, or something else. In this course, you will enhance the technical, interpersonal, conceptual, and political skills needed to run effective and efficient organizations embedded in diverse communities, policy arenas, and sectors. In class, we will engage in a collective analysis of specific problems that leaders and managers face—first, diagnosing them and then, identifying solutions—to explore how organizations can meet and exceed their performance objectives. As part of that process, you will encounter a variety of practical and essential topics and tools, including mission, strategy, goals, structure, teams, diversity and inclusion, motivation, and negotiation.

Past Courses

    • Anti-racist Leadership 

    • Personal Leadership Development

    • Homelessness: Learning in Action

    • Critical Theory & Social Justice in the City

    • Youth Mentoring in the City

    • Independent Research 

    • Sociological Imagination

“But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility...This is education as the practice of freedom.”

—bell hooks,
Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom