Teaching
My teaching is rooted in a desire to help students understand how meaning is made. I want to empowers students to communicate complex ideas, while also teaching them to analyze networks of meaning around them. In all of my courses, I lead open-ended discussions where students can share their knowledge with the class and come to their own conclusions.
Upcoming Graduate Course
Future Pasts: Speculative Histories in U.S. Ethnic American Literature
spring 2020
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This class will explore historical fiction, broadly defined, along with scholarly works of speculative history. We will examine the way history is re-envisioned by ethnic communities and through ethnic communities. Historical fiction is very much about the present, but it is also about futures that never happened, opening up the past’s potentialities that were forestalled by “what happened.” The genre offers an avenue for recuperating knowledge that was disrupted, interrupted or obliterated by colonialism’s historical erasure. Students should expect to read one book-length work and one journal article per week. The course will culminate in a seminar paper. Readings will focus on U.S. historical fiction from the 19th to 21st century and may include William Apess’s “A Eulogy on King Philip,” Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, Xicotencatl, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin, Jovita Gonzalez and Margaret Eimer’s Caballero, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Colton Whithead’s Underground Railroad or other similar works.
Link to UTA Syllabi
Online Course Design
In spring 2016, I designed UTA's first online Intro. to Mexican American Studies course. That fall it became the first UTA class to receive Quality Matters (QM) certification, which is an external peer-review process for online courses conducted by an international non-profit organization. My pedagogical essay, “Undoccumented Outcomes and Cyber Coyotes: Teaching Ethnic Studies in the Online Classroom” draws from my experience creating the course. Placing ethnic studies courses online poses a unique set of challenges but is especially important because it
increases awareness and access for students who may have difficulty attending traditional classes.
Image credit: Melanie Cervantes