My passion for being an educator derives from the radical alive-ness I feel in the experience of encountering the world in a curious, creative, collaborative and compassionate way. The purpose of education is therefore not merely to obtain knowledge, but to cultivate a way of being based on action and reflection in dialogue with the (human and non-human) world around us.
There are several important implications of this pedagogy that I will bring to my courses. These are commitments that I make to my students and that I ask my students to commit to me and to their classmates.
I position all participants in the course as having unique and valuable insights and experiences to contribute, regardless of age, academic credentials, or other factors. We are all teachers and learners in this classroom, regardless of age, academic credentials, or background. To encourage productive dialogue will require respect for different ways of knowing, speaking and writing.
Because learning is a relational process, I highly value dialogue that invites a diversity of perspectives into conversation with each other. This dialogue will be a critical one, but will deploy critique as a tool – not to denigrate a person or the ideas they are expressing-- but as a way to decode the meanings that underlie these ideas, to dig deeper and draw out what is most valuable, to reshape—or when needed – to cut way ideas that are not well-founded or useful to the task at hand. Critique can also be understood as a playful process taking a given set of objects (texts, statements) and animating them in new ways that excite the imagination. It can also be cast as improvisation taking a story line in ways that the originator could not have imagined and that open up new ways of thinking and speaking.
Students’ roles will be to share their own insights on the course material and their areas of expertise and experiences and clear and concise ways, to listen actively and carefully to each other, to be aware of how they are contributing or detracting from a positive classroom environment, and to be responsible for the achievement of their learning objectives.
Aligned with the values of environmental justice, I also foreground community knowledge and leadership in my classes. This entails teaching project-based studio classes with community organizations (non-profits and/or government agencies) as the co-creator and beneficiary. Recent classes include CRD 149 in which students developed an Environmental Justice Framework to inform the City of Davis General Plan and the creation of Environmental Justice Design Guidelines to implement EJ at the neighborhood scale. I regularly invite guest lecturers to represent the advocacy, public policy, and scientific frontlines of the issues under study in the class to share their practical experiences and inspire students’ future career and civic pathways.
CRD 147: Youth and Community Change
CRD 149: Environmental Justice and Community Development
CRD 243: Critical Environmental Justice in the Global South
CRD 153A: Community, Technology and Sustainability in Nepal