Teaching & Pedagogical Innovation
Teaching
A sociologist specializing in gender, law, and qualitative methods, I am interested in teaching about intersections of inequality. I currently teach courses in the Sociology Department that are cross-listed with Gender & Sexuality Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Global Studies.
My goal as a teacher is to
-
Implement best-practice pedagogical methods for meeting the learning needs of all my students, by facilitating active and inclusive learning
-
Foster intellectual engagement with key theoretical, social, and political questions related to sociology and the intersectional ways in which inequality operates and is resisted in our social lives
-
Engage students to learn about underrepresented topics and populations
Throughout my courses, I accomplish these objectives by aligning my interactive teaching methods with measurable learning objectives tailored to each course and its students. I believe in the power of all my students to envision the world in which they want to live and to take action to make it real. But because you can’t change what you don’t understand, interdisciplinary feminist and critical race methods offer students a strong platform for building concrete skills to both understand and destabilize existing practices of knowing.
Interdisciplinary Pedagogy Workshops
Outside of the classroom, I have led a variety of reflective, developmental pedagogy workshops. As a Fellow at the Chicago Center for Teaching, I worked to strengthen my department’s attention to pedagogy. I co-taught “Fundamentals of Teaching in the Social Sciences: Research Methods & Design” and co-organized a teaching development symposium in spring 2019 in the sociology department. The co-organizer and I invited a diverse faculty panel to address intersections of inequality in the classroom and ways in which sociology courses constitute fertile spaces for helping students understand inequality as constituted through social processes that we (re)produce.
As a Race & Pedagogy Working Group member, I co-organized events to discuss how to address inequality in a variety of classrooms: “Inclusive Teaching in STEM,” “Race & Pedagogy at the Smart Museum,” and “Diverse by Design: Crafting Inclusive Syllabi.”
I have engaged with leadership service on teaching in a number of other ways, including serving on the selection committee for our Center for Teaching’s course design award and providing micro-teaching evaluations to fellow instructors in Sociology.
Developing Innovative Pedagogies
With two Curricular Innovation Awards in 2020, the University of Chicago has recognized my commitment to growing as a professor, innovating pedagogical methods to improve remote learning during the pandemic, and amplifying the voices of BIPOC scholars in academia. I am dedicated to promoting undergraduate and graduate students’ capacity to produce exciting, original research. I have organized four symposia for the UC Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality featuring original research conducted in my courses by students, and one of my Curricular Innovation grants is funding research about hookup culture, consent, and the COVID-19 pandemic with an undergraduate research assistant.
Curriculum Development
TEACHING MODULE: Challenging InteRsectional Inequality Through Digital Media Images
Recently Gender & Society announced the roll out of new modules for their Pedagogy Project.
The module I created highlights work by Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Dr. Moya Bailey, and Izetta Autumn Mobley.
In this unit, students will gain a deeper understanding of two key concepts developed by the featured authors, Crenshaw’s (1991) concept of representational intersectionality and Bailey and Mobley’s (2019) Black feminist disability framework.
The different sections of the teaching module consist of 3 parts:
-
Part I: Explain the Core Contributions of the Texts
-
Part II: Apply Concepts from the Texts to Digital Media to Build Visual Literacy
-
Part III: Create / Curate Mini-Art Exhibits to Challenge Representational Dimensions of Intersectional Inequality
