Pedagogy (The 5 C’s)

When I teach a course, I always begin by sharing my core values with students:

1. Community: Building an environment where everyone is willing and feels comfortable to contribute.
2. Co-Creation of Knowledge: Decentering the instructor to create knowledge through the exchange of ideas and perspectives with/between students.
3. Collaboration: Prioritizing discussions and group projects that prove we are stronger—and better—through diversity.
4. Critical Thinking: Interrogating power structures that we take for granted in everyday life.
5. Challenge: Pursuing growth without fear of mistakes.

Class Projects

If the course lends itself to public facing projects, students are encouraged to create knowledge for audiences beyond the classroom/university.

One project I highlight here is the “Civic Engagement Timeline,” a digital humanities/デジタル・ヒューマニティーズ project my Social Justice and Civic Engagement (Fall 2024) class created as their final assignment. Students learned about civic engagement and collaboratively created a class definition. Then, based on this definition, students researched acts of civic engagement from the historical to the present—sometimes even in unlikely contexts.

Civic engagement is the act of contributing to the community or individuals. This can be done individually or as a part of a group. Civic engagement seeks to enact social change and reflects on the power that the people have, particularly as communities identify problems and seek to solve them. It ranges from local to national levels.

Course Syllabi

I have designed several courses throughout my time as an instructor (since Fall 2019) in different institutions and departments. I have selected a few representative materials and linked them below.