Teaching Philosophy
My understanding of the world is deeply rooted in my relationship to the senses and how they help us better comprehend our surroundings. My teaching philosophy embraces not only what is immediately perceptible but also that which lies beyond sensory grasp—the invisible, the silent, and the ephemeral. Recognizing the privilege of being seen, I guide my teaching and scholarship by centering whose voices are heard, emphasizing counter-histories and the haunting narratives that surround them.
In the classroom, I seek intersections among themes and common threads where my work aligns with my passions and commitments. I prioritize fostering attentive participation, critical dialogue, and enthusiastic engagement with assigned readings. In my most recent course, Material Culture and Communication, I designed seminars and assignments to cultivate a collaborative, inclusive, and intellectually enriching environment for students and myself alike.
When constructing syllabi, I consider these guiding questions:
1. Whose voices am I privileging?
2. How do my assignments encourage students to engage with these voices?
3. What tools does this course provide to enhance students’ critical thinking?
In practice, this approach manifests in courses like Visual Communication and Social Change, where students collaborate with migrant youth in Tijuana to produce multimedia testimonios that challenge dominant victimization narratives. Rather than simply analyzing media representations, students become active creators, working alongside community partners to foreground stories of resilience and agency. These projects result in bilingual digital archives now utilized by community organizations for advocacy, demonstrating how community-engaged pedagogy directly serves social justice goals while inspiring students from marginalized backgrounds to pursue media careers.
My pedagogical approach mirrors my research methodology in the Sonic Street Technologies project, where I employ participatory mapping to center community knowledge and voices. Just as my research involves co-designing documentation processes with Sonidero communities, my classroom becomes a space for collaborative knowledge production. Students don’t merely consume academic content—they participate in the same ethical, community-centered approaches that guide my scholarship. This alignment between research and teaching strengthens my commitment to the scholar-practitioner model, where academic inquiry and community engagement inform and enrich one another.