Teaching is liberation embodied. To arrive at this philosophy, which is at the center of my practice as an educator, I connect my own classroom experiences with the writings of Toni Morrison and bell hooks, two of the last century’s most radical thinkers on the purpose of education. Morrison writes that “the function of freedom is to free someone else,” while hooks explains that “education teaches us how to create community.” These declarations are my pedagogical touchstones. I believe critical learning, particularly about the past, builds a foundation for the life-long practice of mutuality and freedom, which must be shared. It is the task of the educator, then, to teach students openly and honestly about the world we together have inherited, and to empower them to change that world, extending the practice of freedom to others. Accordingly, I believe education ought to be a communal practice, built on trust. To learn, students must trust their teachers, and, of course, teachers must trust their students, understanding that they embody knowledge that instructors cannot know.

To create the kind of student-driven classroom in which trust, curiosity, and liberation can thrive, I aim toward three main objectives when teaching history. First, I strive to enable and empower my students to understand history not as static fact, but as a dynamic medium through which they can form and voice their opinions, clarify their ideas and beliefs, and learn to communicate effectively in both written and oral forms. In my classroom, history is alive, intimate, and made usable to students; as such, I aim to divide my teaching time equally between content delivery in the form of lectures and readings, and guiding student outputs through class discussions, breakout sessions, and one-and-one dialogue with individual students. By focusing on the why and how of history as much the who and what, I have witnessed students make deep, powerfully-felt connections between themselves, their communities, and the past, while also building their confidence as critical readers, writers, and thinkers.

Second, I aim to challenge my students’ perspectives and expand their worldviews, while also excepting them to do the same for me. In both lecture and discussion, I demonstrate for students the chaos, contingency, and circularity inherent to history, assigning readings that explore a wide range of perspectives on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class. As an interdisciplinary educator with a background in activism, I take my students’ intellectual, social, and emotional needs seriously when teaching about diversity and difference. On days when lectures take up topics that might be particularly difficult for students, I always make sure that I check in with their needs by beginning and/or ending the class with a group discussion. What do students need or want from the material that day? What can we do as a classroom community to ensure that everyone feels safe and included? By incorporating this check-in practice in my pedagogy, I aim to build a practice of accountability that flows between teacher and student.

Third and finally, I endeavor to teach students that they are active stakeholders in their own education, and in the legacy of the past that they have inherited. To this end, I encourage my students to see themselves, their families, and their communities as the result of historical events and actions, and in turn, to see themselves as both global and local agents of historical change. To facilitate this understanding of history as a participatory and creative practice, I employ active and kinetic learning in my classroom. Students are often asked to move around the space, and where possible, to walk around and through the landscape in order to facilitate the incorporation of the learning material through movement. When students understand the places they inhabit as imbued with history, their understanding of the power they already have within and over those places increases.

By the time students reach high school, they are already critical thinkers, prepared to explore the complexities of the past and their own present and future engagement with it. As an educator, I consider it my responsibility to continue to cultivate their critical thinking skills, to provide detailed feedback on their writing, to introduce them to readings and narratives that challenge them, and to support their creative, personal, and even political and activist endeavors wherever possible. Above all, my pedagogy aims to nurture an inclusive classroom environment that prioritizes student inquiry so that by the time students leave high school, they have built a communal foundation for the life-long experimentation and practice of freedom.