Teaching

How I Teach

Teaching at the intersections of race, gender, and disability demands that I encourage my students to be active participants in changing the world around them; therefore, I strive to shape my classes in a way that equips them to be advocates for change. In both my undergraduate and graduate courses, I stress the importance of community engagement and the digital humanities in enhancing students’ breadth of knowledge of African American literature, culture, and history. For example, in my undergraduate survey courses, I have incorporated several visits to the local Harn Museum of Art in Gainesville to enrich students’ active engagement with the visual arts.

In my graduate seminars, I work toward providing multiple opportunities for professional development for graduate students. I have organized two panels with graduate students to present at major conferences, including the College Language Association and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. In my Critical Disability Studies course, I offer the seminar as a space for collaborative learning and community engagement within the University and the Gainesville community. Students have collaborated with the UF Disability Resource Center to create an online two-part event that connects students, faculty, staff, and community members to foster access, inclusion, and diversity.

I’m also committed to collaborative learning and teaching. I received a course development grant from the Center for the Study of Race & Race Relations to support myself and a professor of history to team teach a course we developed entitled Race and Disability in US History and Literature.

What I Teach

Through a variety of genres including poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction, students gain familiarity and develop an understanding of the historical and cultural contexts that shape the African American literary tradition. My courses are interdisciplinary in nature and have been cross-listed with the African American Studies program and the history department. As one of the core faculty for the African American literature track in the department, I teach several courses on the core curriculum, including African American Literatures I and II. My upper-division undergraduate course, The Black Subject in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture, examined key debates surrounding Black citizenship and personhood during slavery, the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction, while my Disability, Narratives, and the Black Body course identifies current political, social, and/or economic issues that shape constructions of disability and Blackness in modern day America.

One of the most sustainable assignments I offer undergraduate students is the Wikipedia project. Students work extensively throughout the semester building and maintaining informative Wikipedia articles to improve the digital presence of under-represented African American authors such as Ann Allen Shockley, Benjamin Brawley, and Rudolph Fisher. Through this assignment, students work collaboratively with each other and other Wikipedia editors to relate the cultural contributions of people of the African diaspora through the world’s largest free encyclopedia. You can find out more information about this project here.  

Check out my course syllabi for more.