Teaching Philosophy

My approach to teaching and research stem from more than 12 years’ professional experience in community and economic development, grassroots politics, journalism, and nonprofit management. These experiences revealed the ways planners, architects and public officials often underestimate the power of social and cultural capital, subjugate certain knowledge forms, reinforce structural inequalities, and undermine marginalized communities’ agency. At the heart of my teaching philosophy is a desire to train future leaders to move marginalized communities’ histories, planning methods, and agendas from the periphery to the center of practice and policymaking. This requires that students learn to view marginalized populations as more than issues or objects of concern. Instead, my students will learn that those in the margins often hold spaces of what bell hooks called “radical possibility.” I situate my approach in this space of radical possibility between didactic teaching of core competencies and critical pedagogy. My students will be effectual scholars who understand how power and identity permeate every institution and are exposed to a wide range of epistemologies, histories, and theories associated with marginalized people and places. Further, my teaching and service reflect my commitment to supporting students who may be classified as nontraditional. For example, I created “Is a PhD for Me?” an online community, where I mentor minority, mature, and LGBTQ graduate school applicants.

Classroom Experience & Future Courses

• Cultural Landscapes & Ethnographic Methods*
• Planning History & Theory
• Financing Public Infrastructure and Pensions
• Municipal Budgeting
• Community-Based Preservation & Surveying
• Urban Studies Research Methods
• Diasporic People, Places, & Politics
• Preservation as Social Justice
• Critical Place Studies
• Fundamentals of Planning
• Participatory Planning
• Qualitative Research Methods
• Modern American City course

Teaching Style & Methods

Building practical skills such as budget analysis and urban planning in accordance with federal regulations are as vital as understanding dominant ideologies informing these professions. I equip students to perform well while challenging them to become effectual agents of change. However, I am equally committed to creating safe spaces to engage difficult questions and their own positionality. I prefer project -based learning to foster students’ abilities to work in teams and to employ reflexive approaches to writing and research. In these ways, students learn how to build relationships with and identify grassroots innovations from within communities of color based on trust whether working as a group or while conducting individual field research. By designing core planning courses with students’ various learning styles in mind, placing positionality and reflexivity at the center of research methods training, and recognizing that inclusiveness and equity are as important to how research is conducted as it is to the outcomes sought, my teaching helps create ethical, skilled, social scientists.