teaching

courses taught

• United States History (1865-present)
• United States Government
• AP African American Studies
• AP US History
• The Art of the Personal Essay

condensed teaching philosophy

I believe in education’s power to liberate. In my classes, I center students’ experiences and push them to implicate themselves in the historical development of the world around them. Every individual is capable of self-consciousness and self-actualization. Collectively, that capability is beautiful. My goal is to guide my students toward a beauty and curiosity around them.

I look how bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Franz Fanon think about education. Here is a quote from Fanon that I think about often: “…political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence … it is ‘to invent souls’… What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too…”

I also think about this from Du Bois often: “I sit with Shakespeare, and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm and arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out of the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed Earth and the tracery of stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?”