Teaching

Undergraduate Courses

Education in American Society

The intent of this course is to examine forces, ideologies, and structures that inform attitudes and trajectories of education in contemporary American society. Education, broadly considered, has historical, socio-cultural, philosophical, economic, and political influences. I say broadly considered because education is not limited to traditional modes and formal environments of schooling. As social creatures (Baldwin, 1985, Levinson, 2000), we can learn through informal experiences as well—from talk-story sessions to encounters with diverse educational spaces. The course fulfills the contemporary ethical issues focus requirement.

In 2022, I designed a writing intensive version of this course and received instructor-based approval from University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Office of General Education.

(Upper level; online and face-to-face)

Introduction to Multicultural Education

What is multicultural education in 2023? Recent events show this question remains unresolved. For example, in 2021 California became the first state to require that students take ethnic studies to graduate high school (starting with the class of 2030) and to adopt an Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. However, book bans in US school districts increased by 28% in the 2022–2023 school year after already doubling in number in 2022. Seven states have passed laws restricting content in schools and school libraries; much of this content addresses race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. Why are there opposing viewpoints on multiculturalism and diversity?

This course takes an interdisciplinary and global approach. Through group discussions, lectures, writing assignments, and reflection, students will practice an inquisitive learning style that emphasizes critical thinking, curiosity, and creativity to understand the nuances of multicultural education. We will draw upon a variety of materials including films, literature, relevant recent events, contemporary scholarship, and popular culture to untangle the different attitudes to multicultural education as well as the underlying motivations informing these perspectives.

(Synchronous online)

Deconstructing Difference: Education and Society

Through the lens of education, this class will examine how systems of power and privilege pathologize difference and diversity and, alternatively, the approaches of resistance that enact liberating practices by engaging in a productive and affirmative power of difference. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which education, broadly considered, both actively and passively participates in maintaining power, oppression, and privilege in the United States. First, we’ll interrogate the narrative that education is simply either a site of neutrality or a tool working against repression. Second, we’ll look at how difference and diversity themselves are constructed. This means that social, cultural, historical, philosophical, economic, and political entanglements influence their development and enactment. Our study of difference engages several overlapping themes: the production of subjectivity, the body, how power operates and is produced, and the role of stories and archives. Throughout the course we’ll consider how archives themselves can perpetuate difference, often through the absence of those voices who have been historically underrepresented and marginalized.

(Face-to-face)

Graduate Courses

Foundations of Educational Theory

Questions of “what is education”, “for whom is education”, and “who is an ideal learner” are intricately entangled with how education is conceived and enacted. Discerning these embedded entanglements is a key focus of this course, which will explore assumptions guiding contemporary educational discourse—meaning the rules that determine what and how we communicate—as well as related practices. Doing so will require critical engagement with the philosophies and theories informing those assumptions. 

Course material is organized around several themes: knowledge and learning, assessment and the body in education, infrastructure and the commons, study, and sensations and pedagogy. We will begin the course by examining the intellectual foundations that inform what it means to know and to learn. As we will see with subsequent texts, this raises multiple concerns that are addressed by approaches including critical theory, cultural studies, philosophy, media theory, critical pedagogy, feminist theory, political theory, aesthetics and affect theory, and curriculum theory. Through these themes and materials, we will encounter questions of being and knowing that are central to making informed and ethical educational decisions from the classroom to policy and beyond. 

(Online and face-to-face)

Pedagogy

My pedagogy emphasizes three areas: critical thinking, creativity, and curiosity. I approach these areas in my teaching and research by encouraging an ability to think critically about educational issues, cultivating creativity to understand these issues, and finally, engaging curiosity about understanding their impacts. For example, my teaching highlights personal experience and popular culture as productive avenues to critically examine educational issues and to make the philosophies informing these issues more accessible.