Teaching
I make way for growth to unfold in containers of possibility
My Approach
I am interested in the holistic development of learners. My role as an educator is to gather the material to work with (curriculum) and provide a supportive container (learning environment)—one that is always striving to be more accessible, inclusive, and decolonized. I hold that space with integrity, removing barriers when possible, to make way for students to learn about themselves and how they authentically and purposefully navigate this complex, challenging, and beautiful world.
To me, the classroom is an invitation for students and myself to co-create the world we want to live into. It is a place to practice ways of being that align with what is important to us and what we want for ourselves and our communities. What we do inside this container is as instrumental to systemic change toward justice, liberation, and regeneration as policy, advocacy, and organizing.
"Committed acts of caring let all students know that the purpose of education is not to dominate, or prepare them to be dominators, but rather to create the conditions for freedom."
— bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
My Work
Post-Secondary
I am an Adjunct Professor in the Environmental Studies Department at Seattle University where I teach Environmental Beliefs and Behaviors to undergraduates, co-listed in the Psychology Department. This course explores the myriad factors that shape our beliefs about, and our behaviors in relationship to, our environment. We dive deep into social, cultural, economic, historical, political, and other factors that contribute to this shaping, and the subsequent impacts on our health and wellbeing. We use our own personal life experiences to do much of this investigation, using reflection and creative expression to share and learn about our collective environmental relationships. In the second half of the course, we experiment with ways to change environmental behaviors on campus and in the local community through a design studio, where we use human-centered design process and behavioral economic principles to co-create interventions. This course is designed to build self-reflection, creative expression, research and observation, critical analysis, and design thinking skills. It is also designed to support community-based learning in a co-created supportive container.
Academic Coaching
I am an academic coach with Northwest Educational Services where I specialize in executive function support, college applications and transitions, all levels writing, language arts, and other subjects. As an academic coach, I am passionate about supporting people to direct their own learning and growth. I love working together with learners of all ages to uncover their passions and find the path to success that fits their unique interests, skills, and growth edges.
Youth Programming
I am passionate about creating and facilitating youth programming that invites young people to learn, grow, and express on their own terms. I recently co-designed a program to engage young people in public planning processes through somatic, arts-based visioning of the future they want to live into using multiple media and virtual reality.
Activity Highlight
In Environmental Beliefs and Behaviors, an environmental psychology course, students completed a behavior change design studio component, which followed a human-centered design process with a design justice framework. Here are some images of one group's work during the process from Winter Quarter 2022.
Visioning
I guided students through a somatic visualization exercise to identify through embodied imagination what they envisioned for the future of human-environment relationships. We identified shared values and trends they would expect to see in that future world.
Framing
After students had chosen their focus—in this case, gardening and plant care—we went through an exercise to surface the goals, biases, assumptions, and theories that the group held related to the environmental behavior.
User Journey
Students completed research using their own behavior as the main data point. They also informally surveyed their peers. Using this research, they created a user journey map to better understand the perspectives of their intended audience, identify pain points, and illuminate opportunities. They then used these insights to ideate and prototype strategies for changing their own behavior, refined their design, and created a final recommendation for a campus-wide intervention to support their behavior change goals.
