Teaching

Overview

My pedagogy facilitates learning through praxis, enlivening the everyday as a potent site of knowledge production through multidisciplinary inquiry that extends learning far beyond the classroom. Over the past decade, I have developed and taught a variety of undergraduate and graduate-level courses. These range from introductory courses in transgender and queer studies to specialized seminars in Latin/x American Cuir and Travesti Theory, Queer of Color and Trans of Color Critique, and Trans Studies in the Global South. I have also taught Spanish language courses of all levels as well as English language conversation classes through the support of a Fulbright Teaching Fellowship (2010-11). As a professor and from my interdisciplinary training, I draw on theories and methods from transgender, gender, sexuality, and feminist studies as well as Latin American, visual culture, literary, and performance studies. With this broad background, I design courses that constellate qualitative and quantitative objects, methods, and questions to reach students across a wide variety of disciplines ranging from humanities, to STEM, to studio art. At their core, all of my courses ask students to unpack structural inequalities by grappling with larger social problems through student-centered inquiry and experiential learning wherever possible.

Community Engaged Learning

My pedagogy is both place- and practice-based, encouraging students to become deeply attentive to localized regimes of power. While at Duke, I sought additional pedagogical training through a competitive year long Service-Learning Faculty Fellowship (2016-17). As part of a cohort of faculty and staff teaching community-engaged learning courses, I met monthly with other faculty fellows to develop ethical models for community engagement and to examine challenges, opportunities, and questions related to community engaged teaching and learning.

“Introduction to Transgender Studies” as a Community Engaged Learning Course

While participating in the Faculty Fellows program, in Fall 2016 I designed and taught Duke’s first “Introduction to Transgender Studies” course as a community-engaged learning course. To do so, I developed partnerships with seven community organizations, placing pairs of students with community partners such as Duke’s child and adolescent gender care clinic, HIV/AIDS organization Latinos in the Deep South, a local LGBTQ archival and oral history project titled “Love and Liberation,” Durham-based LGBTQ youth organization iNSIDEoUT, and the Museum of Durham History. Throughout the semester, students designed reusable resources like infographics for Latina transwomen to access HIV medications, an archival exhibition on local LGBTQ history installed as part of the Durham County Public Library’s North Carolina Collection, and interactive Tableau graphics on trans discrimination presented to the ACLU to fight transphobic legislation HB2. Through discussions and weekly written reflections that tied trans theory to community engaged learning, students critically examined practices of civic engagement and interrogated the way that power produces lived conditions of precarity in Durham and beyond. At the end of the semester, I organized a community engaged learning showcase where students presented their final projects inviting community partners, students, and Duke faculty across the university to come together to share resources and form relationships to further support ongoing community-based work. 

For more, see:

• Interview: Teaching "Intro to Transgender Studies" as a service learning course

• Student perspectives on service learning in Duke Today

Undergraduate Student Mentorship

As a professor, I have also mentored numerous graduate and undergraduate students. I currently serve as primary advisor to multiple doctoral students and doctoral candidates. From my commitment to experiential and applied pedagogy, I have also advised undergraduate community-engaged learning projects. In Summer 2016, as part of Duke’s Data+ Program, I worked closely with a small team of undergraduate students majoring in mathematics and computer science, serving as a mentor to help them design and execute a 10-week intensive summer research project analyzing the National Transgender Discrimination Survey dataset. By assigning readings and facilitating discussions that introduced students to foundational work in transgender and feminist studies, I led students to combine their existing empirical skills with critical theory, impacting their project’s design and enabling them to ask more intersectional questions of the dataset. Through our discussions, they further came to question the ways in which data not only represents but also produces particular social categories such as race, class, and gender, challenging their existing assumptions about data’s neutrality. As part of this summer research experience, we further put theory into practice by visiting the state legislature in Raleigh where students used their statistical findings and what they had learned from our readings and discussions to educate state representatives about the impacts of transphobic legislation, challenging legislators to repeal North Carolina’s House Bill 2 (HB2).  

For more, see:

• “Quantifying Discrimination” short video on project (below)

• “Gender Identity Data Put Summer Students on the Front Lines” in Duke Today

• Transgender Discrimination Survey project description

Pedagogy Workshops

As part of my commitment to feminist pedagogies, I have also developed institution-wide pedagogical programming to grow interdisciplinary spaces of practice-based reflection. At Duke, for instance, I created a variety of workshops to provide further training for instructors, such as “Trans* Inclusive Pedagogy” with Francisco Galarte and “Teaching Queer” with Wahneema Lubiano. In these interactive workshops, I led participants to discuss their existing classroom practices, role-play tough teaching moments, share resources, and develop action plans for future interventions to make their classrooms and pedagogies more radically inclusive. These pedagogical workshops foster institutional change from the bottom up, asking faculty and staff to become more accountable to both their students and each other. 

Pedagogy Workshops:

• On Trans* Inclusive Pedagogy with Professor Francisco Galarte

• “Teaching Queer” with Professor Wahneema Lubiano and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Janie Long, Duke University