Short Teaching Philosophy
A class is made by those in it. I believe students bring experience, insight, and important questions to each class, and transformation—student and faculty transformation—happens through our co-production of knowledge. A student may feel, for instance, they don’t know anything about a complicated topic like gender, when, in truth, they’ve felt its effects in how they’ve communicated their entire life. It takes reflection, discussion, and critical interrogation to understand the structures in which we live and how to communicate responsibly in them. I believe responsible communication—that is, communication that seeks to mitigate harm, exercise literacy with information, connect the personal and structural, build genuine community, and contribute to a just society—is itself action. And we practice it every day together.
Communication as a discipline, as a site of teaching and learning, grapples with the fact that beings are unavoidably open to the influence of communication—responsive (and so responsible) to other beings.
Courses Taught
Pacific Lutheran University, Assistant Professor
Introduction to Media Studies
Introduction to Communication
Introduction to Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies
Gender and Communication
Intercultural Communication
Multimedia Production
Media and Cultural Criticism
Contemporary Issues in Media and Visual Culture
Communication, Race, and Surveillance
Debate/Advanced Debate
Media, Ethics, and the Law
Example of Unit Summaries for Intro to Media Studies
I value combining theory and making. Below are visual unit summaries I distribute in Introduction to Media Studies.
