Teaching and Pedagogy

Dr. Valerie Francisco-Menchavez aspires to be a teacher that employs various strategies of learning that invites students to recognize their educational potential and increase their critical thinking skills. To this end, I take advantage of problem-posing pedagogy and encourage student leadership through in-class activities wherein students can exchange ideas as both learners and teachers. By providing opportunities for in-class interaction, students exercise critical thinking and practice articulating their thoughts succinctly while listening to others and responding accordingly. I invest in active learning strategies to provide various touchpoints with material through small group discussion, creative assignments or free writes on sections of the reading. I apply equity-minded pedagogy through different iterations of concepts from discussion to lecture to daily writing so as to give students opportunities to digest the course’s key lessons. Further, I demonstrate that I value students as both learners and teachers in class by providing various avenues of engagement and assessment in the classroom and beyond.

Courses Taught

Undergraduate:

  • Global Sociology (SFSU, SOC 483)
  • Families and Society (SFSU, SOC 464)
  • Sociology by The Bay (SFSU, SOC 275)
  • Asian Americans in the U.S. Historical and Political Process, Reconstruction to the Present (SJSU)
  • Asian Americans in the U.S. Historical and Political Process, Precolonial to Reconstruction (SJSU)
  • Race and Ethnicity
  • Social Inequality
  • Looking at the World Sociologically: An Introduction to Sociology
  • Gender and Society

Graduate:

  • Transnational Approaches to Gender and Sexuality (SFSU, SXS 799)

 

 

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: