Teaching Philosophy:

• Since I just turned in, and all founding members are invited to the class, here is my “Teaching Philosophy.”

My teaching philosophy draws from the fields of decoloniality, my intellectual ancestors' in liberation theology (Cone), African notions of reality, African philosophies (Abimbola), the lived experience of Black peoples of the americas,  and esoteric sources.

I draw also from the deep well of knowledge, like most Black thinkers, from the often unrecognized intellectual labor of Black women and femmes in the americas. There is no framework, construct, or solution to the current series of crises we now face as humanity they haven’t already articulated quite clearly. Decades ago.  Because of this  I use theories of pedagogies and teachings that transgress (hooks) as bell taught me.

My goal in the classroom  always as a Black Queer abolitionist pedagog, who gained their power analysis by way of incarceration and houselessness rather than way of the academy, is a shared shift in consciousness.  To accomplish this  goal  one must allow  the lines of student and teacher to be constantly redefined, able to retain the ability to  learn as a pedagog, admit faults, be accountable to the classroom as community (St. John et al.).

I believe in these critical times I am called to be radically  authentic. Even when faced with personal or professional consequences. This is why my method of teaching and living try to be as  one, heavily weighted on flipped classroom models, storytelling, anti-capitalist in structure, abolitionist in methodology, and critical of the “inherent  nature” of past academic claims around so-called  history. I find assessment of my own teaching style is simpler in these methodologies. Students vote with their feet. In the classroom as a community model  you will receive the reports in various ways, either empty classrooms or well crafted activities and areas of research left unattended by students  all semester.

In the academy “the goal of an  education” pedagogically and philosophically has been decidedly teleological and progressive. This doubles down on a post-reformation conception of reality, ontology, epistemology, and in turn  the pedagogues it creates. The academy often suffers from the same colonial matrix of power known now as the world system called “white supremacy.” Ontologically this white supremacist perverse drive within us all, or a subconscious “need” to categorize every experience, person, group, and so called “culture” western “enlightenment” has or will  encounter. I believe it is caused by this teleological or progressive view of reality, pedagogy and humanity. The destruction of mystery leads to loss of knowledge seeking for knowledge's sake. We are now left with classrooms that are mere fact finding missions for capitalism's benefit alone, not society writ large.

As a historian I believe this leaves little room for emergence, or more accurately re-emergence of  land back narratives, practices, and pedagogical approaches.

I have achieved this  new emergence and experienced this shift in consciousness in a  “class as a community”setting  to date in hundreds of  private classes,  trainings, and large keynotes with other thinkers by not avoiding the idea of “progress,” but instead deconstructing its very notion using the theory and methods already stated.  The classroom community concerned with “history” must reject   the concepts, frameworks, theories, and methods that uphold the idea that there could ever be a universality to these objectively “real” lived experiences of “history” and “time”.

Pedagogy itself is a lived experience. Liminal. Transient. Ephemeral. Sentient even, for after all, pedagogy is made up of people, not ideas. “History” is also made up entirely of people , and in my current framework it is treated  the same. The classroom then becomes the place where we embody these ideas. Like a live music performance, it is an art, and it requires everyone involved to be on a shared journey or experience. A conversation must happen between instructor and classroom, teacher and community with a sacred devotion to learning each other's melodies and  songs, and when moments of synchronicity emerge, we record them the best we can.

My decolonial counter narrative, or research method, is called impact history.  Impact history treats history as a fluid narrative, and marks time, or our perception of time, by the event that has the most long lasting societal “impact” on the land we now live on.

It does not presuppose universal experiences of the phenomenon of time or history, but instead looks at history with a trauma informed lens knowing that individual trauma can cause the perception of time to change, and applies that same learning to systemic and generational trauma in a “land impact first” narrative. People groups are privileged in this view as follows: by who was taken from land, who had their land taken, and who settled in lands that were new to them.

Impact history includes intended and unintended consequences of so-called “technological leaps,” expansion, and exploration of the “world.”  The “impact” of contact of these different peoples, stories,  had on each other and using those instances as a starting place for land based historical narratives, we can start to decolonize history.  It tracks the effects on each people group's  story, relationship, and “ownership” of the land they live on today. In so-called “Western Esotericism” and its study as a historical and cultural phenomenon its is the missing piece of the needed hermeneutic for historians and practitioners seeking this “inner knowledge.”

I believe esotericism, its  history, and its ontology,  not only has modern praxis; it may be our only hope in deconstructing our current ecological armageddon, loss of democratic ideals, heteronormativity as cultural weapon, and the other deleterious effects of white supremacy and the colonial matrix. Our future lies in co-crafting separate ontological realities (Goodrick-Clarke).

My commitment is to collective liberation through abolition as a pedagog and absolute divergence (Gramsci) as an artist from the colonial matrix.

Works Cited

Abimbola, Wande. Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus. Athelia Henrietta Press, 1997.

Cone, James H. The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Orbis Books, 2011.

Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas. The Western Esoteric Traditions. Oxford University Press, USA, 2008.

hooks, bell. Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom. Routledge, 1994.

St. John, Edward P., et al., editors. Teaching the Whole Student: Engaged Learning with Heart, Mind, and Spirit. Stylus Publishing, LLC, 2017.

San Juan, E. “Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avantgarde.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 37, no. 2 (2003): 31–45. https://doi.org/10.2307/3527453.