teaching is not neutral. it either reproduces the conditions students inherit or opens space for something else — something slower, more uncertain, more collectively held. my pedagogy begins from that commitment and stays there, in the daily labor of building classrooms that take that premise seriously.
my approach is grounded in the conviction that learning is a relational practice — not a service delivered, not a credential produced, but a social formation that unfolds through dialogue, care and shared responsibility. i come to teaching as a queer, non-binary, latinx, learning-divergent, first-generation american, and that positionality is not incidental. it shapes what i notice, what i name, what i refuse. it also shapes who i am watching out for in the room — students navigating institutional structures not built for them, whose survival inside those structures is already a form of labor.
the classroom i build is not a neutral space, and not a comfortable one. it is a space where hierarchy is examined, where dominant narratives are available for critique, where failure is pedagogical and process has more authority than product. i take seriously the insight that resilience is not evidence of institutional success — it is often evidence of institutional neglect. when students are enduring rather than learning, something in the structure has failed, and that failure is mine to address, not theirs to absorb.
i draw on ungrading practices — not as a workaround, but as a structural commitment to learning over compliance. assessment becomes dialogue. the grade, when it must exist, is not the point. what matters is whether something shifted — in the student’s practice, in their thinking about what a practice can be, in their relationship to their own making.
i am interested in teaching as fugitive practice. the most important learning rarely happens inside the institution, inside the crit, inside the brief. it happens in the margins — in a conversation before class, in a community agreement revised in real time, in the altered book a student keeps returning to all semester. durational threads run through my courses because sustained attention over time produces what single assignments cannot.
i draw on self-organized education as a lineage and a live practice. black mountain college, the antiuniversity of london, the black school, the museum of care, studioELL — these are not historical references but working models. they insist that education must be revisable, accountable to those it gathers, and grounded in how people actually live and make. my syllabi are designed to carry that logic — open enough to be responsive, rigorous enough to open students to curiosity and possibility.
teaching is living labor — durational, affective, embedded in everyday life. it resists commodification by refusing the separation between learning, care and social responsibility.
ultimately, the classroom is a site of collective reimagining — not a promise of transformation, but a practice of it. a present-tense commitment to the conditions under which people can think and make and stay in the room together.
teaching as care. teaching as refusal. teaching as ongoing, unfinished, necessary work.
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