Teaching Philosophy

My pedagogical training finds its roots in oral history and community learning, as much of my childhood was spent bouncing between various Sikh youth camps across the country. Training in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed with Dr. Nesha Haniff during my BA, I realized that many of the ways in which I had learned to make learning accessible, relevant, and dialogue-based were a direct challenge to the typical teacher-student hierarchy and the “banking" concept of education.

As a scholar of racecraft and empire, my teaching goals are to center the narratives of oppressed peoples, through literature and dialogue, and challenge my students to understand the structures of power, violence, and social status that influence their daily realities. As a TA in UCLA’s Sociology department, I have mentored and taught students who often feel isolated within the walls of the university. Deconstructing core texts, I work alongside my students to make visceral connections about our experiences in the world regarding race, class, and belonging.

By bringing unique teaching tools into the classroom, like recordings of stand-up comedy and excerpts of creative writing, and not shying away from difficult conversations that appear when students’ internalized white supremacy inevitably appears, my educational praxis is for my students to develop not only an intellectual understanding of race, but a practical one as well. With these teaching and research intentions, I hope to validate and affirm the experiences of racialized students in my classroom and racialized communities globally.

My teaching was recognized with a 2018-2019 Teaching Excellence award in the Department of Sociology, an honor earned by TAs who received consistently high evaluation scores and noteworthy remarks from their students. Through my teaching, I aim to embody the spirit of a pedagogy that does not reproduce hierarchical positionality, but rather creates a space for inquiry and praxis that centers each person’s lived experiences within the context of their structural and material reality.