My Teaching
As an assistant professor, I have developed and designed several undergraduate ang graduate courses in sociology, some of which have been cross listed with Africana and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. While at Virginia Tech, I developed a new course titled “Plantation Politics: The Black Sport Experience,” to offer a critical look at role that sports play in shaping Black life broadly. This course engaged with Black feminist scholarship on sports, as well as work from within race, gender, and sexuality studies more broadly. My teaching philosophy centers on the feminist axiom, “the personal is political,” as I believe that personal experience can lend insight and clarity into larger social problems. My students often read a novel or memoir in my courses rather than standard textbooks, while also engaging in creative projects like podcasts, and my social inequality annotated playlist assignment, available via the American Sociological Associations “Teaching Research and Innovations Library for Sociology.” The assignment allows students an opportunity to demonstrate knowledge and understanding surrounding issues of social inequality via music. This assignment has been adapted by other professors in the US and abroad.
Over the years I have taught independently and as a co-teacher in several courses including: Introduction to African American Studies (undergraduate), Social Inequality (undergraduate), Introduction to Social Inequality (graduate), Race & Ethnicity (undergraduate), Race & Racism (undergraduate), Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality (undergraduate), Plantation Politics the Black Sport Experience (undergraduate), Black Aesthetics: Black Girl Magic (undergraduate), Making All Black Lives Matter (undergraduate), Slavery and Carcerality in the Globalized Present: Towards Abolitionists Pasts & Presents (graduate).
As a classroom community, our capacity to generate excitement is deeply affected by our interest in one another, in hearing one another’s voices, in recognizing one another’s presence.
- bell hooks