My critical pedagogy approach is informed by feminist and anti-oppressive frameworks that prioritize curiosity over guilt and defensiveness and offer tools to address practices of bias and oppression embedded in individual and cultural practices, institutions and ways of knowing (e.g. Tall Bear and Saranillio, in Spady). I encourage active, critical listening to manifest a “politics of recognition” and shift our “hierarchy of attention.” (Dreher, 2009, p. 454) Techniques here include co-creating a group agreement, listing what we each need to fully participate in class, such as sharing the speaking space and defining jargon. This agreement can be called up in seminar and research meetings to remind us of agreed upon principles and resolve collaboration issues as they arise. We engage a ‘Calling in and Calling out” tool (Seed the Way, 2021) to support conflict resolution, which, in the spirit of anti-oppression approaches, aims to keep everyone in the room, engaged in the challenges of equity and inclusion work.

I learned key principles of Paolo Freire’s critical pedagogy (1968) in human rights activist and English as a Second Language teaching work, through critical race pedagogy (e.g. hooks) and in co-creating FemTechNet’s collaborative pedagogical approach. Blending these frameworks, I aim to teach to student’s lived experience and provide opportunities for students to obtain the skills and knowledges they seek, which support their imagined futures. For example, I invite students to adjust readings, assignments, timelines, and point value on our course outline. I ensure class content reflects a diversity of scholars, and theoretical and methodological content from global communities of knowledge. I provide students with diverse options for class engagement—including online discussion boards, presenting text and multimodal scholarship, and working individually or in groups. We arrange class seating in a round to encourage students to dialogue with each other, disrupting my position as expert. Accessibility is key to critical pedagogy; here, I provide clear and transparent guidelines for assignments and assessments (including detailed rubrics); flexibly support students with disabilities or enduring hardship; and encourage techniques of self-care to enhance emotional and cognitive wellness. I am deeply invested in enhancing student’s spoken and written communication skills. I provide ample, supportive notes to research paper drafts to improve structure, argumentation, and voice and assign peer feedback assignments to build skills in constructive critique. Similarly, I provide opportunities for class leadership, ensuring students each lead a discussion or group project. In the research lab environment, leadership and group decision making are central—I position students as knowledge holders and decision makers. Students are lateral participants in research meetings with collaborators, lead sub-projects, supervise undergraduates, and author and present at conference presentations and help steer the direction our lab.

Critical Thinking: Feminist, critical race, anti-colonial and critical disability studies inform my classroom teaching, engagement and assessment techniques, united in a “how do we know” framework. Informed by Haraway’s situated knowledges concept, this framework recognizes that the world we understand is the one we make, making us responsible for its construction. Here, we name and recognize the context by which knowledge is made across course content, and presentation and writing/making assignments. We map scholarship and art/design work within a history of ideas trajectory to recognize the importance of historically-situated values, and reveal the dynamics by which knowledges are made, normalized and reinforced by a range of pressures and reveals how privilege is linked to epistemology practices. This technique functions to demystify theory, and build students’ critical and argumentation capacities, and their confidence and agility with academic practices. Situating work historically also helps students to avoid dismissing content as outdated or non-traditional content as invalid. A second technique I employ is Genealogical thinking, to thwart casual argumentation and address the ‘conditions’ that make possible a fact or argument. Using online discussion boards and in-class whiteboards, students trace convergences and divergences across arguments, gaining capacity in synthesis and problem solving. Lastly, I materialize theory in popular culture and art/design examples to make it accessible to students from diverse and equity deserving backgrounds. Binding critical pedagogy to critical thinking approaches builds students’ capacity with scholarship and their ability to employ it in their own work.