Teaching Philosophy

 

I believe the role of education should be to liberate individuals from the shackles that imprison their minds and spirits, a prison enforced by bias and injustice present in our social, economic and political structures. Therefore, schools should be a place of learning and self-actualization, a process of discovering personal and collective worth and meaning in order to change society. Teachers hold a special role as facilitators that guide students to an awareness that they have the power to change not only their situations, but the world as well, equipping them with the critical thinking and skills to do so.

 

My social economic background as the daughter of Filipino immigrants who grew up in the largely working class enclave of Westside Long Beach, CA most influences my view of myself as a teacher, as well as my perspective on students and their potential for learning. The concrete realities that arise with the myriad of identities I carry, such as being Brown and female, fused with theoretical foundations I encountered reading pioneers in critical pedagogy to inform how I see myself as a teacher and student of the world. Two of the most influential teachers I’ve encountered has been Black feminist writer bell hooks and Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. While I will never be able to be a student of theirs in real life, they both had a huge hand in mentoring me as I developed my ideas on the moral, cultural and social dimensions of education.

 

Reading hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed for the first time in college, I experienced a profound paradigm shift, finally having for the first time in my life, a political language with which to explain something that I had always had a feeling was true: that there is no such thing as a neutral education process. Consequently, education for me became about what Freire called the “practice of freedom,” the means by which men and women deal critically with their reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world. Therefore, teaching is a fundamentally political act rooted in struggle that is liberatory, transformative, and oriented towards social change. Through the lens of critical pedagogy, I understand education and specifically literacy as more than being able to read and write. Critical literacy allows students, particularly those who are marginalized and discriminated against, to acquire critical consciousness of themselves and the world around them. This is the hope I hold for myself, my students and the world I envision for all of us.