Teaching Philosophy
Core Beliefs
Teaching is always political, necessarily relational, and fundamentally embodied. It is political because it shapes and is shaped by power, determining whose stories are centred and whose truths are believed. It is relational because deep learning requires trust, reciprocity, and care. It is embodied because knowledge is felt, carried, and lived through the body.
Relational accountability is a cornerstone of my teaching ethos. I am committed to cultivating spaces where students and I are answerable not only to one another but to the communities we serve and the histories we carry. I believe in holding space for disclosure whilst encouraging boundary-making and judiciousness. When disclosure occurs, the lesson plan gives way to collective presence. We do not analyse disclosures; we honour them. Those moments become living examples of trauma-informed, community-rooted pedagogy.
Rationale
My pedagogical approach is grounded in Paulo Freire's call to conscientisation, Frantz Fanon's theory of sociogenic trauma (which links colonial violence to psychic distress), and Caribbean and Black feminist epistemologies, particularly the work of Sylvia Wynter, M. Jacqui Alexander, bell hooks, Cynthia Dillard, and Patricia Hill Collins. These scholars centre embodied knowledge, spiritual ecology, and the integration of intellectual, emotional, and ancestral wisdom in learning. Walter Rodney, whose insistence that education must serve liberation anchors my practice, taught that education is never neutral: it either reproduces oppression or interrupts it. This tradition informs my refusal to separate content from context, theory from action, or mind from body in the classroom. When I invite students to critique Jamaican mental health policy through a decolonial lens, I am teaching in Rodney's legacy of historically grounded, structurally aware, and people-centred praxis.
Teaching Context
Discipline
I teach across Social Work and the Applied Social Sciences with a focus on trauma-responsive practice, mental health, and decolonial research. These fields demand more than technical competence; they require ethical clarity, historical insight, and a commitment to structural transformation.
Learners
My students are predominantly Caribbean nationals, many of whom are first-generation university learners. They bring rich experiential knowledge but often contend with institutional cultures that have not historically affirmed their identities. Many juggle work, caregiving, and healing from personal and intergenerational trauma.
Learning Environment
My classroom is emotionally, intellectually, and culturally spacious. I create environments grounded in ritual and rhythm: we often begin with breathwork, journaling, or silence, and end with collective reflection. I offer cultural framing for students unfamiliar with such practices, linking them to Caribbean oral traditions, ancestral wisdom, and communal healing. These practices slow the pace of institutional time and help students become more fully present as learners and as whole human beings.
Teaching Methods
Specific Strategies
My pedagogy integrates contemplative practice, arts-based inquiry, and dialogic learning. I draw on storytelling, visual reflection, oral histories, and embodied approaches to create multidimensional engagement. Through these methods, I encourage students to inhabit multiple perspectives and make abstract theories viscerally real, particularly valuable when exploring trauma, power, and ethical dilemmas in social work practice.
Active Learning and Application
In my classroom, active learning means students are not passive recipients of knowledge but co-creators of it. They challenge assumptions, bring personal and community histories into the centre, and collaboratively build new frameworks.
Students have designed culturally relevant psychoeducation campaigns incorporating Caribbean storytelling traditions and vernacular languages. In trauma modules, they use Fanonian analysis to deconstruct the bureaucratic language of social work assessments, identifying how institutional discourse can retraumatise those seeking support.
Rodney's influence is especially visible in modules where students map the historical lineage of Caribbean social policy (from colonial poor laws to contemporary interventions), highlighting how systems consistently manage rather than heal Black suffering. In doing so, they practise curriculum-based reparative work: naming harm and imagining alternatives.
Assessment and Evaluation
Alignment
My assessment practices mirror my pedagogical values. Traditional tools like standardised exams often reward compliance and penalise divergence from Eurocentric academic norms. In contrast, I employ multimodal assessment: creative portfolios, reflective journals, collaborative artefacts, audio essays, and community-based projects. These approaches honour diverse intelligences and offer students meaningful ways to demonstrate their knowledge.
Feedback & Evlaution
I offer detailed, personalised feedback, inviting students into dialogue rather than delivering verdicts. Students engage with this feedback through follow-up reflections, encouraging metacognitive awareness of their learning process. I also use anonymous mid-semester "temperature checks" (brief surveys on clarity, connection, and safety in the classroom) to guide real-time adjustments. I assess my teaching through multiple lenses: student reflections, peer collaboration, and my own journaling practice. I consider not only learning outcomes but also affective outcomes: are students becoming more confident, connected, and conscious? I also reflect on how well my teaching resists institutional habits of disconnection, hierarchy, and over-intellectualisation.
Goals and Reflection
Student Outcomes
My goals for students are threefold:
1. To understand how structural violence and intergenerational trauma shape Caribbean realities
2. To integrate ethical reflection and critical analysis into their professional identities
3. To cultivate confidence in their own wisdom, histories, and capacity for change
Professional Development
I continue developing my teaching through contemplative pedagogy training, trauma studies, Caribbean feminist scholarship, and arts-based research. I also learn in community with students and activist-practitioners whose lives exceed the boundaries of the university.
Challenges and Growth
Early in my teaching, I struggled with balancing openness with structure. Students needed grounding and clarity as much as spaciousness. Over time, I have developed better scaffolding for creative risk-taking, including co-setting deadlines and building in collective feedback loops. My teaching now embraces this tension as a generative force rather than a problem to solve.
Impact
Students have drawn on classroom practices to influence field placements, design culturally grounded interventions, and co-publish research. They report developing greater confidence in bringing their cultural knowledge into professional practice. Most meaningfully, former students often tell me the classroom helped them "come home" to themselves (an impact I do not take lightly).
