“Education is the practice of freedom. Teaching is an opportunity to build community, transgress against hegemonic influences, and to ignite a passion for learning that extends beyond the classroom.”
Teaching Philosophy
Teaching Statement
Education is a pathway to liberation. Liberation is the process towards one's desired direction of freedom. One’s capacity to experience freedom is enhanced through the liberation of the mind.
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Grounded in bell hooks’s vision, every course is designed as a site of transgression against hegemonic knowledge structures. Disrupting business-as-usual in the classroom is the pedagogy, not an act of rebellion. Students are invited into critical consciousness, not passive reception.
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The classroom is a community before it is a curriculum. Every pedagogical choice from discussion structure to assignment design is made in service of building a shared learning community in which all students feel witnessed, valued, and accountable to one another's growth.
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In the tradition of Paulo Freire, students are not vessels to be filled but thinkers to be challenged. Critical thinking is taught as a liberatory practice — the capacity to interrogate assumptions, hold complexity, and generate knowledge from one's own standpoint and experience.
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Drawing on Audre Lorde's conception of the erotic as a source of knowledge, power, and deep feeling, teaching is understood as an act of love — bringing the full self into the pedagogical relationship, modeling what it means to be moved by ideas and committed to liberation.
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As a practitioner-scholar who actively sees clients, teaching is never abstracted from clinical reality. Theory is always in dialogue with practice, and the body as a site of knowing is honored through somatic, narrative, and relational approaches to learning and meaning-making.
Drawing from Freire’s insistence on critical consciousness and hooks’ emphasis on love and community, I view education as a pathway to liberation. By liberation, I mean the intentional movement toward one’s own chosen forms of freedom. This movement begins with the mind. As learners develop critical awareness and question dominant narratives, the capacity to experience and even imagine freedom expands from the self into relationship and action.
Education, as the practice of freedom, is thus a process of activating critical thinking and an opportunity to build community. In alignment with the writings of American philosopher bell hooks (1994, 2003, 2009), I hold the standpoint that teaching to “transgress” hegemonic influences is an educator’s most important goal.
My philosophy of teaching is rooted in critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970/2018), in conversation with hooks’ engaged pedagogy, where classrooms become spaces to cultivate critical consciousness, practice freedom, and build beloved belonging. In practice, this means I design learning experiences that invite students to question hegemonic norms, tell their own stories, and co-create knowledge.