My teaching incorporates cultural and literary studies, second-language acquisition, and the study of urban and environmental issues in Latin America and the United States. I have taught and mentored students at both a large research university (Duke) and a smaller, undergraduate-focused institution (Santa Clara). My upper-level courses include offerings on Latin American environmental aesthetics, Mexican cultural history, and Latinx public art and urbanism in the San Francisco Bay Area. I have also taught various levels of Spanish and Portuguese language courses, and am committed to holistic curricular design that introduces students to core cultural and textual competencies beginning at the earliest stages of language study.
The central objective of my pedagogy is to strengthen students’ multiple literacies as observers and interpreters of the world around them. I design classes around rich textual, visual, and aural objects, placing an emphasis on the analytic and communicative tools most relevant to the media and content at hand. I establish an active, collaborative community of practice through a combination of small-group discussions and hands-on exercises. My advanced literature and culture courses cultivate spatial, visual, and cross-historical methods of inquiry, putting texts and images in conversation to pose questions about social and environmental change. In my course “Reading Mexico City,” students produced collaborative digital maps and exhibitions using public image databases, which served as resources for developing analytical essays. Recognizing the unique challenge of written communication in a second language, I scaffold all stages of the ideation and writing process, using group and one-on-one brainstorming sessions, informal blog posts, annotated drafts, and final versions bolstered by multimedia components and in-class presentations. My courses employ a range of study objects and assessment formats to facilitate entry-points for students with different aptitudes and learning backgrounds. In light of this priority, my classroom has been described as “a safe environment that encourages students to expand their skills” and “very intellectually stimulating” because of the diversity of perspectives incorporated.
In more introductory language courses, I adopt a variation of the flipped-classroom model where students review grammatical concepts and vocabulary through guided homework exercises and then apply their knowledge dialogically in class. As with my upper-level courses, my language classes are media-rich environments, scaffolding group activities and discussions with authentic materials such as videos, artworks, songs, and informational websites. In a given class, students engage in a variety of prompted conversations, research-based and performative tasks, and games. Different class exercises draw from a common cultural repertoire. In a recent class, a song by Celia Cruz served as a starting point for a discussion of grammar and syntax, a group research exercise on Caribbean musical genres, and a game using coins emblazoned with the singer’s likeness to practice object pronouns. I integrate a variety of evaluations to holistically assess students’ oral, written, technical, and cultural competencies: these include in-class writing exercises, at-home recordings, guided group projects, one-on-one conversations, and quizzes based on studied cultural material. I allow the use of generative A.I. as a conversational tool for at-home practice, but design activities and assessments that empower students to collaborate, reason, and produce language using their own voices.
At all levels, my courses instill students with media literacies relevant not only to the materials assigned in class but also to the texts and images they encounter in their everyday lives. These literacies extend beyond written and visual materials: indeed, I show students how works of literature, art, and film serve as tools for “reading” built and natural environments both in their immediate context and in the world at large. I emphasize the spatial aspect of course materials through hands-on mapping exercises using digital tools such as Omeka and Arc-GIS. I also take students on visits to art exhibitions and urban environments relevant to course themes. At Santa Clara, I am currently developing a Spanish course on urbanism and public art by Latin American and Latinx artists, which involves numerous site-visits and contacts with community-based organizations in the Bay Area.
I aim to balance my own expertise with the forms of peer-to-peer knowledge sharing inherent to a diverse classroom. The readings and artworks discussed in my classes often raise questions of racial, class, gender, and ableist domination. I guide students through the formal and contextual aspects of these works while providing ample room from student reflections rooted in their own experience and knowledge. Evincing my broader teaching priorities, 100 percent of recent course evaluations have agreed or strongly agreed that my classes are “welcoming and inclusive” as well as “open to a variety of different student experiences and perspectives.” I continually solicit feedback on course content and classroom dynamics through both one-and-one conversations and anonymous evaluations. My office hours function as an open environment for discussing assignments, course concerns, and broader personal interests. One student told me that she felt classroom discussions focused too much on formal literary prose at the expense of the everyday uses of language by marginalized groups, which she believed would be most important to understand for connecting with people from the country in question. This feedback allowed me to refocus subsequent class sessions, as well as suggest avenues for that student to explore her interest in colloquial speech through specific readings and course offerings.
Beyond the classroom, I have helped sustain interdisciplinary humanities labs which have proven successful in galvanizing collaborative research between faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. I served as a mentor in the Visualizing Cities Lab at Duke, where I worked with students to develop a public workshop on Global South urbanism using digital visualization tools. Though I guided them with relevant texts and resources, my mentees brought knowledge of a wide range of subject domains and Spanish, Chinese, Farsi, and Urdu language to bear on their research and contributions.
I am eager to continue work in devising pedagogical models which stimulate collaborations among students and faculty from different language programs and disciplinary backgrounds. A central aim of this work is to address structural access barriers in the humanities stemming from high school preparation, gatekeeping, mismatched course content, and economic constraints. As a part of such initiatives, I am committed to tracing the progression of diverse student cohorts from introductory into more advanced humanities course offerings, while working to pinpoint causes of attrition and developing targeted responses to remedy them.
I firmly believe that student interest in the humanities is stimulated by connections between coursework and experiences out of class, and as such, I am dedicated to building and sustaining spaces for diverse cultural programming on campus including screenings, exhibitions, and guest speakers. In tandem with my research and teaching focus on urban design and visual culture, I am invested in connecting students with design initiatives and art spaces engaged with communities off campus. The prerogative to reduce structural access barriers to the humanities, as I understand it, is a collaborative endeavor among faculty, students, and the community at large. As a teacher and scholar, I seek to build insightful classroom spaces and broader pedagogical networks across campus and the wider community.