Teaching Statement

Taking cue from bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, I see learning and teaching as interwoven acts of resistance to the institutionalization of knowledge; as a result, I consider my role as an educator of literature and language to be both a privilege and a responsibility, particularly in institutional settings. As such, the potential of the classroom as a space for knowledge acquisition, cultural practice and community building structures my pedagogical philosophy. My pedagogical praxis prioritizes interdisciplinary and comparative studies of literature, history, and language. In the Romance Studies Department at Duke, I created and am currently teaching a 300-level topics course, "Feminisms in French: From Simone de Beauvoir to Françoise Vergès." I designed a 300-level literature course on Francophone literature, entitled “Decolonizing Language: French, Colonialism, and Francophone Literature” and co-taught the 300-level course “Cultural and Literary Perspectives” with faculty member Emma Howell. Additionally, I have taught several 100-, 200-, 300- and graduate-level French language courses. Additionally, as part of the Thompson Writing Center, I designed and taught a 100-level Writing core course in Spring 2024 titled “From Beyoncé to Black Panther: Afrofuturism in Popular Culture.” At all levels of instruction and in all departments, I strive to create a welcoming classroom community through a dedication to engaged, decolonial pedagogy as a practice of freedom, sharing knowledge with students while learning from them myself. My pedagogical practices aim to de-center and decolonize the curriculum alongside students, promoting an environment of rapacious curiosity, critical thinking, and intellectual accountability.

As an educator, I am primarily guided by my experiences as a life-long student; as a result, empathy steers most of my pedagogical philosophies and practices. When teaching language acquisition courses, my goal is to create a safe space for language learning. My own research has taught me that language itself is never neutral—that it is an apparatus of power that produces and reproduces the fundamental inequalities of the colonial state. In the context of my classroom, this knowledge has shaped all aspects of my teaching persona and plans and motivated my own commitment to decolonial pedagogy. I rely on a combination of the direct method, communicative, and multiliteracies models to cover a wide scope of skills and to adapt to different learning styles of students. Grammatical competence remains, in my estimation, a necessary foundation for successful language learning; however, it is only one among many. In evaluations, students demonstrated the value of in-class grammar lessons: “The aspects that are most valuable are learning the grammar technicalities in the classroom.”

The direct method of teaching immerses students in the target language, preparing them to use and communicate in the target language as soon as possible. While I do incorporate intentional moments in shared language, I prefer to challenge students not to rely on their native language to succeed in class, and to push students out of their comfort zones, especially for interpersonal communication activities, in the hopes of creating space for liberatory education as a practice. When combined with an empathetic and dynamic classroom community, I have been impressed with and inspired by the responses of my students. As a result, in evaluations of my classes, students expressed that “the classroom ambiance was always fun and made it easy and comfortable for students to participate.” After observation by the French level coordinator, I received the “Excellent” score (5 out of 5) in all categories of evaluation, along with the feedback that my strengths were “positive energy, professionalism, enthusiasm for subject and genuine interest in her students!” Similarly, the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies wrote that she was “impressed” with her observation of my teaching: “I thought this was a great class, an effective use of class time... with a warm presence from the instructor and good engagement from the students. Very good teaching here.”

As a language instructor, my decolonial approach is predicated on flexibility and responsiveness to student interests and needs; I often choose to update course materials to reflect up-to-date ethical sensibilities and issues that are currently engaging student populations, who “enjoyed more relevant units (fake news, climate change, etc.)” according to their evaluations. For example, in a unit on climate change, I created a multi-modal, scaffolded activity in which students watched video interviews with Jessica Oublié and took structured notes on a provided timeline before reading excerpts from her work Tropiques Toxiques and answering comprehension questions that required they use new grammatical structures, conjugations, and vocabulary in groups. According to students, “the activity we did with the chlordécone scandal with the book excerpts and the video and the grammar all tied together was fun and really helpful.” This activity allowed me to focus on a subject that was of great interest to the class (climate change) while incorporating learning materials from beyond the Hexagon and reinforcing recent grammatical lessons. Additionally, I had to make a point to change the names in textbook activities to reflect the expansive, multicultural nature of Francophonie, after drawing students’ attention to the assumptions and implications of these easily ignored phenomena. Although this kind of engaged pedagogy is rigorous for both the instructor and students, the value makes itself clear with student feedback such as “honestly even though it has been kind of hard, this has been the best experience taking French in all my 5 years of taking French.”

When designing my own advanced courses, I have prioritized rigorous learning models with decolonial, diverse and digital course materials to interest and engage students. My course "Feminisms in French: From Simone de Beauvoir to Françoise Vergès," a 300-level topics course, introduces students to the history of French and Francophone feminist theory through a variety of texts, essays, films, protests, and performances. The midterm evaluation for this course is a scaffolded comparative study of two feminist figures, using genAI to enhance research, critical thinking, presentations, and writing while maintaining academic integrity. Students used the generative AI app dIAlogue, developed by a partner and me, to simulate dialogues between feminist figures, prepare for in-class debates as one of these figures, and ultimately write a comparative paper on the two feminists using their accumulated research. In response, one student shared that "this exercise gives us additional information to build new context for the rest of the project. This dialogue also helps with the debate because I understand more how the two feminists talk about their ideas. I would do this exercise again for a project in the future."

Similarly, I designed the Writing 101 core course “From Beyoncé to Black Panther: Afrofuturism in Popular Culture,” in which students learn to write analytically, to make and defend arguments in writing and to develop their own points of view through exposure to and study of our topic of Afrofuturism. In evaluations, students recognized the effort I put into prioritizing a welcoming ambiance: "Prof has created a learning environment where everyone feels respected and equally valued. She genuinely cares about everyone's opinion." Furthermore, I practiced balancing the presentation of information with the encouragement of engaging class discussions, another feature of the class for which students demonstrated appreciation in their evaluations: "I quite like how the class is run. Prof Rosado does an amazing job of facilitating fruitful discussion while not forcing anybody to speak. The classroom is a very patient, lighthearted and nonjudgmental environment." The success of assignments such as a decolonial mapping project, which required students to demonstrate what they learned while challenging their critical thinking skills, helped me refine my engaged pedagogical practices and philosophies.

By engaging with my pedagogical philosophies as an extended liberatory practice, I have learned as much as I have taught. The enjoyable atmosphere of rapacious curiosity, critical thinking, and intellectual accountability—one that that is encouraged by me but nourished by my students—has expanded and refined my own decolonial understandings of resistance and freedom. I am constantly inspired and impressed by the ability of our classroom communities to embrace rigorous learning and radical empathy. As a result, simultaneously learning and teaching the literatures, histories, and languages of the Francophone Caribbean and Black Atlantic through a decolonial pedagogy has been a key measure of my intellectual and professional trajectory.