"Educating is a performative world-making practice that disrupts unilinear time: past, present, and future bleed through one-another in the thick-now of any moment"
Karin Murris
Karen Barad as Educator: Agential Realism and Education
I view intellectual growth as an indispensable part of my ongoing professional development as teacher and scholar. That is why I attend and participate in the Yale Center for Language Study (CLS) workshops and talks. I also take advantage of other learning opportunities by attending webinars on a variety of topics that can directly benefit my students' learning experiences.
Other ways through which I cultivate my skills and knowledge include frequent collaborations with colleagues in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. Professional development also involves being open to feedback. Thus, I have invited colleagues to observe my classes on several occasions. I have also visited the classes of my colleagues to learn from them.
I keep current with developments in the field, sharing my insights with colleagues in my department and in the CLS. I look for opportunities to share my research with national audiences. For example, I presented a paper on rethinking the social space of the classroom through assemblage theory in a panel I organized for the 2021 Modern Language Association conference (“Just in Time: Persistence of Language and Culture Studies during and beyond Pandemic”).
Below are samples of presentations and materials I have shared and/or presented recently.
Digital Storytelling: TikTok in the Teaching of Language and Culture
This presentation responds to the need for a broader view of literacy in foreign language education by demonstrating the affordances of new media for the development of language acquisition and critical thinking skills at all levels. Drawing on the work of Cope and Kalintzis and scholars in media studies, I show how digital storytelling (using TikTok) offers opportunities for cultivating a wide range of knowledge processes, including critical analysis in the target language of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and the politics of language.