MFA Performance, School of the Art Institute Chicago
B.F.A. Graphic Design, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

My work as a multimedia/interdisciplinary artist, diasporic scholar, and community activist are interconnected components that find their way into my teaching. Indeed, my pedagogy – which reflects a career-long commitment to multiple disciplinary spaces and engagement with diverse geographic places – is rooted in the idea that knowledge acquisition involves the creative process. I believe the classroom is a fertile environment for leadership skills, critical thinking, personal and interpersonal development, and a communication tool to help students tap into a sense of purpose in the larger world. I encourage my students to consider themselves as artists in my classroom. As artists, their creativity can give rise to acritical consciousness where they become agents of change who can respond and shape the world they live in instead of merely functioning and adapting to it. That’s why I also urge my students to take their work and ideas outside my classroom, exploring ways to creatively engage public spaces outside of the classroom environment.

Not only do I try to instill in my students an individualized artistic sensibility; I endeavor in my classes to mentor and create a community of artists. Such community-building takes the form of group assignments, which offer students a chance to participate and engage with classmates and find commonalities through guided and active cooperation. I also connect students to diverse communities by accessing my extensive networks as an artist/activist; I frequently bring local, national, and international speakers into direct conversation with my students via in-person visits and SKYPE interviews. Such pedagogical “community organizing” is not limited to the classroom; I engage my students via other contexts by organizing field trips to local museums, artists’ studios, and urban/rural sites in order to show them the possibilities of local activism and, depending on the venue, the impacts of larger forces such as globalization and migration. Again, the classroom is a portal to connect my students with larger struggles and experiences beyond campus walls.

Finally, integral to my arts pedagogy is fostering a sense of spontaneity, improvisation, and creative risk taking. Inside the classroom, we engage in micro-workshops where the classroom is transformed into reimagined spaces for creative engagement. Sometimes chairs and tables are pushed aside to better adapt the room to movement and improvisational exercises. These micro-workshops range from physical calisthenics that boost energies to vocal drills that prepare them to speak out loud, to group memory exercises that activate laughter, joy, and nostalgia. Drawing on my experiences as a movement artist and performer, my teaching methodology acknowledges the body as a catalyst to inspire questions, content, and composition. My classroom becomes a portal for critical engagement whereby students can creatively transform “heavy” abstract concepts into their own personal stakes. I, then, urge students to take creative risks by stepping outside their comfort zones and push them towards experimenting with forms, mediums, and ideas that open them to new possibilities of expression and conceptualization. By allowing students to find conceptual relevance through a creative catalyst, meaning is generated in their own language and within their worldview. My courses always extend beyond the classroom walls, as students utilize their bodies to engage in personal, political and cultural issues that reflect an urgency within the contemporary moment.