My Teaching
When I speak with my grandmother, we talk about the weather. She lives in the desert where I was born whereas I have been living in colder forests for the past six years. Despite our age difference we always learn from each other. She has the wisdom of age and I have the curiosity of youth. Together we have learned to anticipate possible futures for the safety of our family. We know all too well the dangers, anxieties, and violence of the times we were born to live. Yet, there is always a relaxed vitality in the moments we hear each other’s voice. There is a reassurance that together we can care for each other in our speech as we write our lives. Even though I cannot cross the border to visit her, we inhabit a space of care in those calls we share. When I teach, I want to spark the same creativity with my students to care for their speech and writing in the spaces they inhabit with others so they can strengthen their ability to sustain life.
It is no secret that climate change makes movement more necessary yet more difficult. As an immigrant teaching in colonized and settled lands, I have to be careful to teach worlds that most students have not seen. Teaching in this way is not an exercise in fear but a practice to fully care for the pasts, presents, and futures that together in our speech we have, can, and will make possible. Frantz Fanon has a quote in Wretched of the Earth that the settlers’ town is a town made of stone, brightly lit, covered with asphalt, and garbage cans that swallow the leavings unseen. To allow them to see the interconnectedness of the classroom with earth and colonial pasts, presents, and futures requires a pedagogy of transformation. For example, when teaching the introductory speech class, I begin with a satellite photograph of the place we are inhabiting. I ask them what they see. My students invariably mention the topographical qualities of the image but never say the name of the city. We discuss the duration of the land, the ages of the mountainous ridges, rivers, and trees. Then, we talk about the First Nations that inhabit the land in which we currently live. We then have the difficult but important conversation of the violent legacy of colonization. For me, it is a daily exercise to conjure the energy to transform the class materials I have inherited for the course into teaching moments for my students to use in their speech and writing for a better world, and not only their preferred nationality.
My teaching is an exercise because I do not believe in punishing with discipline but develop a practice of care for each other. As someone who has practiced & coached tennis for most of my life, I believe that practice is a daily endeavor. This also means that it is not constrained to the classroom. I’ve had multiple international students through the years come to my office just to be able to speak in their own language. Through these experiences, I have learned that sometimes a Peruvian student just needs to share her anxieties of being in the cold away from home with someone who is also going through the same experience, an Ecuadorian student who needs the language to articulate his political views of his home country to an audience of predominantly U.S. students, a Mexican student who wants to inform her classmates of the femicides in her hometown without making it seem like she comes from a backwards country. I always encourage my students to visit me so we can practice, create, and write together the framings of their speeches, essays, and arguments. In addition, I always schedule a couple of workshop days so everyone can have at least a few minutes of one-on-one time. These are the moments when students can really shine.
Teaching, then, is an exercise in the practice of care. To have successful practices one must be prepared. In preparing for each semester, each class, and each lecture, I trust my students to be empowered to have a say in the structure of each moment we have together. Each semester, my students decide at least one topic they want to learn more about. Each class, they interact with me and each other. I constantly transform the space of the classroom to reduce the power differences of one person standing and talking to, instead of with, a group of sitting people. Each lecture, I leave space for my students to drive the argument by running the lecture through their examples, topics, and interests. It is in these moments when we learn from each other through our voices. Though I have not taught graduate courses, I plan to bring this same level of care, exercise, and dedication to transform our realities in the moments we share. My dad used to be a university professor back home and the thing he loved the most about teaching was that he always learned something from his students. For me teaching is also a co-creating exercise for a practice of care in the spaces we inhabit. Each day, each time, I want to learn from my students when I teach.
