I teach six undergraduate and bridge courses related to my research interests. They include one first-year seminar (COMM 62: African American Literature and Performance), two upper-level undergraduate courses (COMM 437: US Black Culture and Performance and COMM 561H: Performance of Women of Color), and three bridge courses (COMM 661: Race Ethnicity and Performance, COMM 662: African/Black Diaspora Culture and Performance, and COMM 665: Performance, Politics, and Culture). Two of my courses (COMM 437 and COMM 662) have been accepted as part of the 2021-2022 Institute of African American Research Student Learning to Advance Truth and Equity (IAAR-SLATE) program, and I have been awarded an IAAR-SLATE Teaching Fellowship for that period.
Each of the aforementioned classes focuses on the ways in which sociocultural constructs like race, gender, and ethnicity slowly shift and sediment within discrete but interconnected contexts over time. These classes offer students the opportunity to examine culture as expressed through the literary arts, staged performances, and/or film; to understand the historical contexts out of which artists generate their work and into which their work exerts itself; to use theory to help examine the workings of power; and to approach identity and culture as performative processes.
In addition to the courses listed above, I have taught the large lecture and seminar versions of COMM 160: Introduction to Performance Studies, which fulfill a general education as well as a majors requirement in the department. Teaching responsibilities for this course rotate throughout my unit. Our primary objective with both versions of the class is to introduce students to the key principles, methods, and practices that inform the field of performance-centered communication concentrating on three broad overlapping areas: performance of/as literature (poetry and prose), performance of/as everyday life (ritual, identity, and culture), and performance of/as politics (power, activism, and social change).
Finally, I teach two graduate-level qualitative methods courses (Com 841: Critical/Performance Ethnography and Comm 825: Decolonizing Methodologies). With each, my primary objective is to help students develop appropriate theoretical and methodological frameworks to support their community-centered research. Toward that end, Critical/Performance ethnography students engage six-to-eight exemplary ethnographic monographs, paying particular attention to each ethnographer’s project goals, guiding questions, theoretical frameworks, and methods. We also attend to how these ethnographers carrying out their projects in ways that benefit the communities in which they work as well as advance scholarship in their chosen fields. In addition, I lead students through a series of practice-based workshops that allow them to apply the knowledge they glean from their readings toward the creation or expansion of their original research. At the conclusion of the course, students submit a 10–12-page analytical paper, the method’s section of their prospectus, or a grant proposal as their written scholarship as well as script and stage performed scholarship intended to promote dialogue and critical engagement.
Comm 825: Decolonizing Methodologies is a core course in the Graduate Certificate in Participatory Research program. The course is co-taught by professors situated in different departments with the following objectives: to guide students in critically assessing research methodologies with attention to problems of power, difference, and colonial structures of knowledge production; to analyze and discuss methodological questions and problems; and to create a plan for research that acknowledges these problems and structures (even if it does not escape them entirely). During the last third of the course, each student benefits from a 45-minute workshop dedicated to helping them address one key challenge they identity in their research involving methods, ethics, relationships in the field, theories, or the structure of knowledge production.
Within both of these qualitative methods courses, I strive to curate weekly seminar experiences in a way that gives students multiple opportunities to practice the types of respect, vulnerability, critical reflexivity, and courage that will help them to engage in generative, mutually beneficial community-centered practices.