"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 my intellectual growth as an indispensable part of my ongoing professional development as teacher and scholar. That is why I regularly 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. Working with them has contributed to broadening my notion of language teaching.
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. Additionally, every semester I invite a Poorvu Center observer to gather mid-semester student feedback so I can maximize my teaching effectiveness.
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 presentations and materials I have shared and/or presented in two venues: the CLS and Yale's Spanish Program. I have also shared them with colleagues at other universities.
In addition to sharing new ideas at meetings, I share resources with colleagues, such as curriculum development workshop handouts, a handout for creating a learning community online (see penultimate document), and a handout I created after attending a workshop at the Yale University Art Gallery. See "The Art of Looking" at the bottom of this page (originally shared as a word document).
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.