In my teaching and scholarship, I address questions of power, representation, and the cultural production of difference with an emphasis on postcolonial and transnational approaches to the geopolitics of disability and representation. I structure my course curriculum around interdisciplinary methods that help students draw connections between culture and representation, feminist and postcolonial Disability Studies, relational and cultural geographies, and histories of nationalism.

 

My pedagogical goal is to encourage students to think differently about cultural representation, privilege, and inequality at the intersections of disability, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, and history. I take great care to integrate creative participatory frameworks into my course materials to help students navigate through this challenging process. The first and perhaps most critical step is to actively seek out, recognize and encourage the multiplicity of student perspectives and learning styles in the classroom while guiding a safe and accessible space that facilitates both individual and group learning. Remaining aware of student perspectives, open to changing the course of instruction based on those interactions and experiences, and maintaining the flexibility to respond to the wholly unexpected is fundamental to this process. As an instructor, it is my job to discuss my own experiential limitations and to demonstrate to the students how to meaningfully interact with the diversity of knowledge and lived experience in their classroom. I draw on a variety of classroom techniques specifically designed to encourage students to explore unique ways of interacting with both the topic matter and with each other. It was through my own student experience from technical college through community college, undergraduate and graduate learning that I came to appreciate just how important it is to seek out, engage and understand diverse student perspectives and life experiences. No student comes to the classroom as an empty slate and I find the most exciting teaching moments happen when students offer their unique interpretation or application of course materials. 

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My teaching appointments at the University of Washington Seattle and my graduate teaching internships and staff positions at the University of Washington Bothell have afforded me the unique opportunity to introduce topics in representational theory and analysis, cultural geography, disability studies, and postcolonial disability perspectives to students across a range of academic disciplines. I had the opportunity as a Pre-doc instructor at the University of Washington to teach my own course curriculum, “Disability Studies, Feminist Theory & Representation.” This course addressed some of the more pressing current-day questions in disability studies, feminist practice, and postcolonial scholarship and explored the historical relationship between disability, gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and multiple axes of difference. The class was highly interactive and included workshop activities, discussions, and group collaboration. I was also a Teaching Associate for the Introduction to Disability Studies offering at the University of Washington in Spring 2019 and Spring 2020. 

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As a Predoctoral Teaching Associate in the UWS Department of Geography, I provided support for the online and in-person course GEOG 123 A: Introduction to Globalization. If the on-campus offering, I was the primary point of contact for 75 students across three weekly on-site quiz/course sections. I was the Teaching Associate for the Winter 2020 Digital Geographies Course and Autumn 2021 Gedemographies offering. My responsibilities included curriculum design and instruction, student advising, grading, and collaboration with the primary instructor on curriculum development and the course canvas site. I was able to take advantage of the global context of these courses and the curricular focus on political geographies and transnational social inequalities to incorporate postcolonial disability theory and disability politics into my class activities and lectures.

 

 

 

 

 

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During the Spring and Autumn quarters of 2014, I was the graduate advisor and teaching assistant for the UWB undergraduate course "Approaches to Cultural Research,” first through my graduate teaching internship and later through my post-graduate staff position as the UWB Undergraduate Research Program Coordinator. In my guided workshop and facilitation sections, I introduced students to disability studies approaches to the social, medical, and deficit models of disability and asked them to challenge their own assumptions about who has the power to define and describe disability experiences. We studied oppressive histories embedded in current day representations of developmental and intellectual disabilities and explored the social movements that have actively resisted these culturally produced ideologies and assumptions. In my final year in the Master of Cultural Studies program, I was co-designer and teaching assistant for the UWB undergraduate media design course "Story as Art, Interactivity and Community Engagement" where I introduced DS Theater and Feminist DS scholarship into the storytelling and participant interview class modules. Finally, I was the primary instructor for BCUSP 290 A: Research in Action, where I foregrounded issues in social justice, disability, and representational practices in my lecture materials and selected course readings.

 

Providing a welcome and safe space for individuals to ask tough and at times uncomfortable questions and to respectfully disagree with a particular interpretation of the course content remains a paramount concern in my teaching approach. It takes careful and intentional planning to successfully implement this philosophy. To accomplish the delicate balance between instruction and collaboration, I shift between the following elements:

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