Teaching Philosophy statement

Alexia has been teaching since 2008, when she first began as a dance teacher for young children. For the past 10 years, Alexia has taught a diverse range of students at multiple universities and across the under/graduate and doctoral levels as full-time and adjunct faculty, and community members in informal learning spaces. Her teaching philosophy is informed by her research emphasis on curriculum and pedagogy, and is built upon a robust, critical pedagogical framework made of the following: Black queer feminisms (i.e., emergent strategy); Decolonizing pedagogy (i.e., Chicana/Latina feminism); Abolitionist feminisms; Culturally revitalizing and sustaining pedagogy; Inquiry-based pedagogy; Project-based pedagogy; Arts-based pedagogy.

Alexia's pedagogical framework brings course and workshop content to life, whereby students situate themselves, their communities, and their futures within the multi-media, layered texts and multi-vocal ideas. Her operationalized teaching philosophy supports students to (re)shape their ideas and ways of relating to one another and to social institutions through lived experiences of critical praxis.

For example, Alexia enacts queer and Chicana/Latina feminist practices of plática and querencia instead of relying on teacher-directed lectures, which supports the co-creation of a classroom and relational space of care and community with her students. Querencia space is the container in which we pláticar and dream liberation into existence throughout the semester, informed by the ideas, scholarship, and artistry we encounter. Alexia models a philosophy of “change is constant” and “openness to ambiguity,” two elements of adrinne maree brown’s emergent strategy (2017), in how she centers relationships over high-stakes, punitive expectations for learning. When conflict arises in the learning space, it is welcomed and seen as an opportunity to refuse carceral logics of punishment, where it is experienced as an opportunity for the class community to practice generative conflict and repair as needed.

Alexia applies an abolitionist feminist praxis that supports students to examine the socio-political operations of power, privilege, and oppression in their lives and across institutions of relating, care, learning, artistry/creativity, and education as informed by course content. She applies further elements of emergent strategy such as intentional adaptation to devise the weekly in-class curriculum that is responsive to her students’ positioning of un/leaning. During class time, Alexia applies project-based, inquiry-based, and arts-based activities for students to engage to develop solo and collective capacities for improvisation, ambiguity, criticality, and intentional creativity. She typically concludes courses with projects rooted in queer and Afro-futurisms where students formulate their ideas resulting from their semester-long un/learning into liberatory visions and strategies for the world they want to build.