Pedagogy

As an educator who efforts to cultivate an anti-racist feminist practice with my students, I “transgress” (thank you, bell hooks) conventional and exclusionary disciplinary divisions that segregate domains of knowledge, and aim to activate collectivity and world-making in the classroom. I devise multi-modal approaches that emphasize the centrality of the body–as a site of experience, knowing, and transmission. Through body-based pedagogies, I encourage students to trust but also critically reflect on themselves, their own histories and social identities, and also learn about and alongside difference. I teach courses at the intersections of critical dance studies, African Diaspora Dance practice/theory/history, Caribbean movement(s), performance studies, ethnography, and gender/sexuality/queer studies. My classroom blurs boundaries between “studio” and “seminar,” and when possible I take students outside to connect to land, the elements of nature, and the stories our built environment might tell. I have taught at New York University, Duke University, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Amherst College, UMass-Amherst, and Davidson College, as well as facilitated workshops across the U.S. and in Haiti.

Since 2019, I have co-convened the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective, a multi-racial and multi-disciplinary group of educators invested in anti-racist embodied pedagogies. We build community around our methods for engaging movement as an anti-racist, feminist, and queer practice in our teaching through workshops, regular practice, performance, and writing. This work grounds my efforts to forge paths through movement and with other educators also concerned with cultivating ethical, relational models of world-building for our emergent student-citizens and for ourselves, as teachers.