Teaching

Teaching Philosophy

“This semester I learned that the more you study something, the more interesting and complex it gets.” – Reflection from a first-year student

Students in my classes on Hispanic literatures and cultures learn to appreciate the complexity and nuance of cultural difference by discovering in historical case studies of social conflict productive opportunities for collaborative inquiry and critical assessment. In the spirit of the liberal arts, my classes are designed to help students learn a variety of analytical and hermeneutic tools which facilitate their interpretation of social phenomena, cultural production, and political platforms, encouraging their personal growth and, to this end, cultivating their intellectual curiosity as humanists who discern the unspoken judgments of others and invite new findings to contradict their own tacit assumptions. In this way, students in my classes are encouraged and, indeed, nudged to leave their comfort zone and to examine argumentative positions which they often do not share and especially positions that are deeply flawed, along with the operative logic on which their advocates rely to advance problematic claims with surprisingly effectual results. That said, I also recognize the crucial importance of my students’ wellbeing as they navigate, against terrible crosswinds, the big ethical questions that they are prone to ask as emerging adults. Attentive to their mental health concerns, I am committed to supporting those who struggle to identify their intellectual passions or to cope with the high-pressure environment of higher-education academic life due to their socio-economic insecurity, their lack of inherited knowledge of academic culture, or to challenges they face as their identities evolve during such a transformative period of life.

One of the ways my students pursue lines of inquiry collaboratively is by examining archival materials. This pedagogical method of “teaching with archives” leads students down paths of investigation on which they reexamine what it means to read, while they reflect deeply on primary sources in conversation with their peers. By having in their hands first editions (or PDF scans thereof), they are invited to link aesthetic or political texts to concrete historical conditions. On multiple occasions I have integrated interactive workshops with archivists from Duke University’s David. M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, during which students learn to examine books as artifacts and to ask questions that are foundational to their material history. A second way that my students learn through collaborative inquiry is by interacting frequently with each other in small-group discussions in the classroom and through peer-review comments in our online forum. By developing rapport with each other, facilitated my course design, students let down their guard and explore ideas spontaneously, sincerely, without the pretense of knowing the right answer because their primary objective is to learn how to ask good questions.

In addition to collaborative inquiry, my students develop interpretive and analytical skills which they apply to problems that emerge in the literature, history, and politics of Latin America. These methods allow them to approach such problems through the study of rhetorical strategies and intellectual history. By studying rhetorical strategies, students learn to identify and interpret the aesthetic and social regimes of oratory and poetry, that is, speeches given by political reformers, chronicles written by conquistadors, sermons preached by missionaries, the revelations of mystical poets, along with the manifestos of modernist literary saboteurs. They also learn to historicize these rhetorical strategies using the tools of intellectual history with which they examine the evolution of ideas and beliefs. By learning about the prehistories and afterlives of an idea or belief, students become effective at recalibrating conceptual formulations after taking into account conditioning factors of historical change. Such is the case, for example, with the inquiry into competing theories of sovereignty in late colonial Latin America, in which students observe how the theory of the divine rights of kings transformed into the modern claims of self-determination based on the natural rights emanating from a people.

Students in my classroom inevitably will address, directly or indirectly, major ethical questions in their lives, not because this ethical component is always incorporated into the design of my courses (although it often is), but rather because I get to know my students, spend time talking to them outside of class about course-related topics but also about life in general, about the difficulty of making decisions, weighing competing options, and taking calculated risks. At the beginning of each semester, I go out of my way to meet for a chat and coffee – so much coffee – every student in my classes, in one-on-one settings or in small groups, as they prefer. During these meetings, students share their interests and concerns more openly than they do in class, and this allows me to think about who my students are and what they care about as I design lesson plans and even tailor my workplan to the extent possible so that it supports their academic trajectories. These meetings also show them that my door is open and that they have a faculty resource whom they may consult not only regarding work for my class but for other questions as well, especially regarding their plans for programs in experiential learning and study abroad. Writing letters of recommendation for study abroad programs as well as receiving emails from former students while they are studying abroad remains one of the most gratifying administrative tasks that falls to me as an educator.

Teaching, as I understand it, is a professional commitment to learn from the learners and to practice self-reflection with a willingness to adjust to the needs of students and to the changing conditions of the learning environment. When a lesson plan does not turn out as I had hoped, I see in that frustration an opportunity for reflection and growth. From my students I have learned that giving meaningful feedback, even on minor assignments such as blog posts, can be a tremendously motivating force in their advancement through a course, and that frequent engagement with them outside class promotes a culture of mutual accountability in the classroom. Attentive to the needs of students at different levels of study and to the needs of departments which must sequence courses and provide a viable pathway through the program, I develop pedagogical materials based on a specified audience, assisting students as they journey from one phase of their learning trajectory to the next.

In sum, my pedagogical strategies attune students to their membership in a global community and present social problems as opportunities for change, both personal and communal. I believe that inequities suffered by racial minorities, women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and the social underclass demand that our pedagogical methods bring to the fore the ethical questions related to these issues which lie dormant, waiting to be asked. As an instructor, I place cultural objects in the hands of students and turn them toward the public sphere to interrogate ideas and practices that have restricted access to education and blocked paths to citizenship, excluding populations based on race, gender, and class. This ethos of confronting inequity and exclusion in the classroom aims to invigorate and propagate the principle of pluralism around which gravitate the liberal arts.