Over several years of teaching, mentoring, and advising students—both as an administrator and scholar-educator—I have come to prioritize trust, justice, and respect as core values of my pedagogy. Leading with these priorities has helped me engage with students and co-instructors in a humanizing and relational way, and I facilitate these values within and beyond the bounds of the classroom by fostering connectedness.
My teaching philosophy is rooted in wholeness, social justice, and critical consciousness. I am inspired by and appreciative of the labor and love of Women of Color, especially those who are transformative critical scholars and pedagogues (hooks, 1994; Rendón, 2009). I lead with intentionality and care, evidenced by the ways I connect daily learning with students’ personal and professional experiences.
I encourage students to critically question the structures of knowledge and power that they have faced in their educational journeys. One way that I aim to establish this criticality is by having at least one learning objective that concerns the process of “unlearning,” as I believe one of the most crucial aspects to leveraging new perspectives is to reflect and critique those already held. In these settings, I commit to un/learning alongside my students in a process of mutual respect and honesty. Above all, I position students’ knowledge, skills, and understandings as assets (Moll et al., 1992) to our institutional learning environments.
CITATIONS
- hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.
- Moll, L. C., Amanti, C., Neff, D., & Gonzalez, N. (1992). Funds of knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 132- 141.
- Rendón, L. I. (2009). Sentipensante (sensing/thinking) pedagogy: Educating for wholeness,
social justice and liberation. Stylus Publishing, LLC.
ANNIE M. WOFFORD, PH.D. 