Teaching
Philosophy
I possess a strong record of teaching literature and language courses in secondary and higher education, with nearly a decade of experience in Chile and in the United States. I can resolve problems and conflicts professionally, attending to personal, cultural, and institutional values. I am also adaptive to the shifting conditions of in-person and remote learning, especially considering the contingencies of international enrollment, technological infrastructure, and public health concerns. In my interactions with students, I leverage my interpersonal skills and multicultural awareness to manage stressors induced by contemporary social and political concerns.
Working with fellow instructors of higher ed., I invite my colleagues to examine their own bias regarding secondary versus college-level education. Each educational level has its desired outcomes, with college education aiming for higher-order critical thinking and professionalization. In my teaching, I demonstrate that this can be achieved through diverse forms of engagement, which can go well beyond lecture, quizzing, and raise-your-hand-if-anything-sticks discussions.
In my teaching goals, I employ strategies to transfer the cultural capital of reading global literatures and languages to diverse career purposes. I design multimedia syllabi that contemplate literature, graphic narratives, and digital tools (such as Minecraft or HTML narratives in Twine) for experimental or collaborative projects. These strategies accommodate students whose strength lies in programming or in spatial-kinetic expression. This demonstrates to students their own capacity to engage critically with literary texts, so that they transfer that skill to their respective fields, giving them a more globally conscious grounding in their humanistic or scientific inquiry.
My formation in professional mentoring focuses on helping students overcome emotional, cognitive, and linguistic barriers to communicate meaningful impressions in environments that pose various challenges. These environments may include political censorship, personal growth, learning disabilities, or the gap that limited cultural capital can create between the educational culture and the student. I believe that the process toward intellectual maturity and critical capacity must be conscious and adaptive to these circumstances. Hence, I maintain flexible syllabi with texts that are optional or slots that may be assigned in later weeks.
In these ways, I aim for continuing intellectual growth that goes beyond the acquisition of privileged cultural capital or the completion of a base curriculum. I hope to form future professionals who are attuned to diversity, capable of long-term intellectual growth, and caring about the social environments they navigate and inhabit.
Classroom dynamics and innovative teaching
Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT): I typically begin my courses by addressing the concept of positionality: I present myself as a foreigner with an accent, whose initial education happened in a country that was just beginning to transition into democracy and reacquiring freedom of speech, press, and publishing. I ask students to talk openly about their origins, from rural Pennsylvania or Saudi Arabia, and to denaturalize the English language as universal, or the West as the center of the world. This strategy stems from CRT; a type of classroom where students first approach literary texts from their intersectional identities and biases, and only progress towards analysis once a communal ground has been built in the classroom. Thus, reading through a global, multilingual syllabus that encompasses early literatures and contemporary narratives becomes an experience of cultural examination and introspection rather than a touristic walk through exotic literary sights.
Multicultural Pedagogy (MP): I integrate MP principles aiming for global/decolonial course design. This means, for example, that I prioritize African, Arab, and Indigenous literatures in the earlier parts of the reading schedule — these regions are often taught at the end of most literature syllabi. This is a recognition that reading across cultural difference requires more energy and emotional investment from monolingual/US nationals, and this energy tends to wane halfway through a 15-week semester. BIPOC, international, or minority students benefit from this reading sequence because it helps to make them feel less alienated early on. They become more confident when they can recognize and demonstrate their unique knowledge in the first weeks of the semester, and other students benefit from their diverse perspectives as well. This makes the classroom more welcoming to diversity, and to break students out of their mold, regardless of the ethnic/national/social group they identify with.
Theory and critical literacy: As I teach general education courses, I make room for brief explanations of theoretical or critical positions that help students ground their opinions in existing intellectual dialogue. We may read superhero graphic novels in the context of the postcolonial, the cosmopolitan, or the posthuman, opening a dialogue about Puerto Rico, its inhabitants, and their precarious geopolitical condition. We may watch Japanese animation adventure films in tandem with George Orwell’s Animal Farm to dissect visual narratives in terms of Western masculinity, biopolitics, or activism and revolution, at the same time that we think through the lingering fear of a nuclear catastrophe in the Japanese archipelago. This prepares students to perceive complicated ideas embedded intothe cultural products that they already consume. Defamiliarizing themselves with these materials requires that they take a second, and in that moment of critical examination, also look at themselves.
Evaluation, assessment, and Public Pedagogy: Beyond literary analysis and discussion, my teaching also considers the world outside the literary classroom, because critical abilities should be evaluated by more means than just close readings, essays, or discussions. Students in information technology sciences or in engineering thrive in assignments where they can demonstrate their critical development through coding or virtual design. Visual learners may play with design media to represent concepts of such as “the virtual” or become much more engaged when we make real-time collaborative slideshows or Jamboards. Kinetic learners connect when we create posters using giant sticky notes around the classroom. Students who are not “good writers” may use voice recordings to create public-oriented podcast presentations. In the case of the Video Game Culture and Virtual Worlds classes, the video games designed were published online for others to experience them. One group submitted their video game about alcohol abuse prevention to the office of student affairs at Penn State. All of these practices belong in the literature classroom even if we are not writing essays, because students are more likely to transfer their knowledge into their occupational areas if they can find utility and dialogue across disciplines.