The best way to describe my teaching is textured. In the same way that the walls in my home are textured (beautiful and unique, but terribly difficult to paint over), my classroom experiences intertwine ups, downs, curves, corners, alterations, and beautiful moments. As a textured teacher, I push students to think critically and embrace challenges. In my classroom, the focus is on the students and we investigate and work on the concept of self. To apply a textured approach, however, I have to weave together three important layers: voice, sight and sound, and touch.
Lift Voices
I often invite guest speakers to my classroom who enrich the details of our content and allow us to delve deeply into conversations that engage students in critical thinking. These speakers from the community allow us to home in on elements of our books or analysis that help develop my students into caring and curious citizens. For example, while reading Gene Yuen Lang's American Born Chinese, we hosted (through a virtual connection) a graduate professor who helped us understand the model minority myth and how it connects to antiblackness. During the same unit, a student's parent visited us to share the legend of the monkey king, one of the most enduring and significant characters from Chinese literature, helping to broaden our cultural awareness of Buddhism, Taoism, and other elements of Chinese culture.
Offer New Ways of Seeing and Hearing
Multimedia recruits the senses in meaning making and allows my students to experience content in new ways. That's why, during each unit of study, I use a combination of videos and music to diversify our content and bring new perspectives to our conversations. In addition to film adaptations of texts, I look for multimedia that connects to our content thematically. This approach allows us to closely read a text in a nonconventional way. For one lesson, I used Mozart's operatic music for Don Giovanni to help students examine the idea of a private versus public self to complement our larger course-long conversation about identity. The threads of this conversation led to dialogue about the influences of social media and reality television, and the unit culminated with a discussion of the movie The Truman Show, which fictionalizes the effects of a constructed reality on one man's conception of self.
Feel the Book
Although seeing and listening are important layers to weave into classroom content, I cannot stress enough the importance of feeling the content. To get their hands on a topic, students need to move beyond the four walls of the classroom. In some instances, we will simply move our discussion or warm-up outside. This small change engages students who may be drifting or feel disconnected from me, their peers, or the content. In other cases, our ventures have a specific destination in mind. For example, as part of a unit covering the text Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, my class took a trip to recently discovered plantation ruins about 12 miles from our school. Going to this abandoned site and observing a structure that had been built by slaves—possibly by a young woman just like the book's main character, Harriet Jacobs—was profound. The experience brought an autobiography published in 1861 to life in an instant.
Unlock Social Justice
Students need to engage with a variety of perspectives, access multiple pathways of analysis, and step into and experience different contexts not because it will give them higher test scores—though that is surely a byproduct of engaged learning—but because it will make them better citizens and stewards of the world. At the heart of my textured teaching is a fervent and unapologetic passion for social justice. My textured classroom offers diverse literature, conveys an appreciation for nonconventional writing and texts, and seeks to instill a sense of cultural competence that pushes each of us to be better.
As an immigrant teacher of color and Latin@, my teaching methods must match my diverse and atypical background. I may be the only Latina@ teacher my students have; I'm also a nonnative English speaker with low SAT scores. My approach to reading, writing, and critical thinking rarely appears in the typical classroom, and that's why I want students to use their senses to reach beyond traditional English curriculum and pedagogy and value different approaches to analyzing the world.
When I think about the people caught up in the hatred and bigotry circulating in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election, I imagine that they missed out on classrooms like mine. Being in these challenging and often uncomfortable educational experiences builds a backbone that makes you stronger and prepares you for world citizenship. Community comradery comes from practice in checking your privilege at the door and a willingness to jump into controversial and sometimes scary conversations. Our classroom communities can create safe environments to respectfully explore difficult questions while also building a broader understanding of the systems that influence our experiences in the world. Those moments of vulnerability are beautiful and promote student growth. As a teacher of color, I live for moments when I see students' walls coming down and they rise to a new level of understanding. I teach as an act of social justice because my students are my hope for our future.