Teaching is a true passion of mine.

I began my teaching career on a volunteer basis, working with Asian and Central American immigrants learning English, and then teaching children with disabilities how to read. My passion eventually motivated me to formalize my instructional strategies, so I earned my Master’s of Arts in Teaching, focusing on special education, from North Carolina State University. After graduating, I served as an elementary special educator for three years.  I went on to earn my doctorate and was able to teach at the bachelor’s and master’s level.

Now, I teach policy and social justice courses at the School of Social Work at Wayne State University. Like in all areas of my social work practice, I approach my teaching from a critical, feminist social work perspective. I recently won the 2022 Teacher of the Year Award, as nominated by my incredible students. 

I specialize in applying universal design and cooperative learning strategies in classrooms ranging from early elementary to graduate programs. By working with students to build a cohesive, supportive, and inclusive classroom community, we can explore the challenging topics in social work with a critical lens.

I have three main goals as an instructor of social work students:

First, I want students to develop a critical lens that helps them participate in praxis to examine their individual and collective practice.

Second, I want students to be able to be curious and explore the topics that matter most to them. To do this I support students in building their own research agendas, exposing them to original research and theoretical readings, and building choice into my assignments and activities.

Third, I want students to learn content as much as process. To be successful social workers, they will not only need knowledge but also be effective teammates, self-reflective practitioners, researchers, writers, supervisors, and more. Thus, I build implicit skill-building into my assignments and provide direct instruction on and modeling of these skills intertwined with challenging content. 

Students in my classes can expect each class to be dynamic, including a mix of lecture, high engagement class activities, and semester-long projects. I provide detailed feedback to help students grow and am flexible with students dealing with all the challenges of life. I am passionate about helping each student grow across the semester and provide students individual and collective supports to achieve this growth. I believe one of the most important things I can do to support  diversity in the future social work workforce is to provide radical welcome in my classroom - from my syllabus, to my interactions, to our classroom culture, to my curriculum - to students who often do not feel welcome, safe, or supported in higher education. By helping students develop a critical lens and meeting my students where they are to support their growth, I hope to contribute to building a diverse and transformative social work workforce to face the challenges of the future, meet the needs in front of us, and repair the harms of the past.