Teaching and Pedagogy

My teaching philosophy centers the potential of students to analyze complex social dynamics and to strive towards a more just and equitable society. Students may realize this potential once they are able to apply critical theoretical frameworks from sociology and media studies to current events and to their own lived experiences. See below for teaching and programming experience that reflects this philosophy.

Lead instructor, SOC298: Racism in the US Media

This original course, for which I was the instructor of record, provides an introduction to media production, media content, and media reception in the U.S. context, and the role of U.S. media production/consumption in shaping racial representations in society. The syllabus, found at the button below, is from the spring 2020 course at Wheaton College on Racism in the U.S. Media. I would like to highlight a few parts of the syllabus design that I would adopt in future syllabi:

• The use of an introductory survey to get to know students’ accessibility needs and learning goals.

• Setting clear expectations of course requirements.

• The marking of total pages of reading and minutes of listening per week, to help students to better manage their workload.

• Highlighting due dates to more easily navigate the syllabus.

• The inclusion of optional readings to encourage students to read and engage with the topics they are most interested in beyond the bounds of the semester.

Podcasting Instructor: A Pedagogical Approach to Storytelling and Technology

In 2019, I co-instructed a course taught within the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University entitled “African American Health Activism from Colonialism to AIDS.” Lead instructor, Dr. Nic John Ramos, assigned podcasts as a final assignment, and I provided my expertise on racism and audio production to create and teach an eight-week curriculum that trained students on how to tell audio stories about marginalized communities ethically.

On the webpage below, Dr. Nic John Ramos and I share our insights on this unique initiative. We have crafted this page to provide guidance and help to educators interested in experimenting with podcasting as a pedagogical tool, particularly in courses where sound or radio is not the primary object of study.

We created a podcast for the webpage, in which we broke down how we supported and evaluated the students in the podcasting process. The podcast was shared on a Sound Studies Blog, Sounding Out! (link), and downloaded over 55k times.

SOC1311 and SOC1315: Organizational Sociology

In 2017 and 2018, I served as a teaching assistant and discussion leader at Brown University in two large lecture-style courses on the sociology of organizations. Each lecture had an over 100-student enrollment, and I taught 2-3 discussion sections per week on core concepts in organizational sociology, in class sizes ranging from 12-21.

The Leadership Alliance, Mellon Initiative

In summer 2018, I was the lead instructor for The Leadership Alliance Mellon Institute at Brown, a program that connects undergraduates from minoritized backgrounds with faculty to conduct research in preparation for graduate school.  I taught 8 undergraduate students from universities across the U.S., advised their research projects, and helped them navigate working relationships with their academic advisors.

Brown’s Graduate Students of Color Initiative

As the Graduate Coordinator for the Brown Center for Students of Color in 2018-2019, I organized an orientation and writing retreat for 400 graduate students of color for two years, ensuring that my fellow students had the tools needed to navigate systems that may not have been designed with their needs in mind. In addition to discussions on time management, writing goals, and navigating advisor relationships, I created a monthly listening series, “Audible Futures,” for graduate students to get together and discuss podcasts with hosts and producers of color.