Inspired by Freirean critical pedagogy widely used in popular education and social movements, I aim to cultivate a learner-centered classroom environment that positions participants as agents of change.
My classes reflect a commitment to transdisciplinarity, comparison, and experiential learning. I also believe that addressing the world’s most pressing issues of environmental sustainability requires competence in drawing from and integrating multiple disciplines. My colleagues and I were recently awarded a Curriculum Innovation Award by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning and the Lincoln Land Institute for our transdisciplinary undergraduate class on urban sustainability. Through a community-engaged comparative case study of urban rivers in the Pacific Northwest with federally designated Superfund contamination sites, students were able to synthesize theoretical concepts in real time, in areas such as river ecology, toxicology, history, public policy, community organizing, and environmental justice. Highlights included collaboration with diverse groups working on river cleanup and facilitating an expert panel with immigrant and houseless activists. These organizers insisted on a deeper clean-up than the EPA’s initial remediation proposal while at the same time focusing on steps to avoid the displacement that was otherwise likely to accompany redevelopment along a cleaner riverbank. See our class blog here.
Classes taught:
- Interpreting Society and the Environment with Qualitative Methods
- Participatory Research Methods for Community Development
- Understanding Communities
- Urban Rivers: Policy, Planning, and Activism
- Intermediate Spanish
- Beginning Spanish
