In my classroom, I seek to honor students’ unique intersectional identities, including race, gender, language, ability, etc. It is my goal to get to know each of my students individually and to create a space where they feel comfortable in dialogue with one another about their differences in perspective and experience. I deliberately center the needs of Black, Brown, Indigenous, and otherwise marginalized students by enacting culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017), and applying translanguaging (García & Wei, 2014), raciolinguistic perspectives (Flores & Rosa, 2015), and other critical multilingual literacies (España & Herrera, 2020). When teaching courses designed to move white students forward in their understanding of diversity, I prioritize representation in the curriculum and activities that are student-centered and student-led. That said, I have encountered white, privileged students who are resistant to taking up issues of diversity in the courses I have taught, and I have found that using guiding principles for conversations toward social justice (DiAngelo & Sensoy, 2014; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012) provide students a common ground for building understanding and a respectful community together. I continually work on my own understanding of anti-racist pedagogy by co-learning with my students, engaging in dialogue with anti-racist scholars through social media and academic conferences and journals, and staying informed about contemporary issues of diversity and inclusion.

At MSU, I taught a course called issues of diversity in children’s and adolescent literature. The course analyzes literature through the following lenses: a single story, privilege/oppression, identity, insider/outsider, and stereotyping. As I continued to develop the syllabus for this course, I sought to choose literature that represents multiple perspectives, identities, and cultures. That said, I believe these topics of diversity can be discussed no matter what literature is used for a course. Often, I ask the  students themselves to bring in intertextual and personal resources to round out our collective understanding of issues of diversity addressed (or not addressed) in the literature we read.

I believe that when students feel safe and free to be who they are, they will learn more freely. Over the past several years, I have been diligently working on creating accessibility measures in my courses to accommodate my students’ individual needs. For example, I ensure my slides and materials are accessible to students of all abilities by providing resources such as closed captioning when possible. At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of my close family members passed away, and I noticed that during that time, my doctoral professors enacted healing pedagogies by accommodating my learning in multiple ways. I aim to do the same for all of my students, humanizing their experiences by listening to and responding to their individual needs.