I teach to change how students see whose stories count as knowledge. My work as a scholar, journalist, and documentary filmmaker has convinced me that storytelling is not the opposite of rigor but a form of it, and my classroom begins there, with the conviction that the people history leaves out are sources, not footnotes.

Across courses in feminist theory, media, documentary, and human rights, I ask students to work with primary material directly. In my graduate seminars, that has meant putting oral history transcripts in students' hands and letting them sit with the difficulty of a real testimony, deciding for themselves what it can and cannot tell us. In my undergraduate courses, it has meant asking students to become makers, to produce a short documentary, a podcast, or a piece of reporting, and in doing so to feel the ethical weight of representing someone else's life.

Some of the most important teaching I have done took place outside the classroom. Over three summers, I co-led faculty study abroad programs that took human rights and journalism students to Greece, Germany, and Italy to report on the refugee crisis. We visited camps, held lectures in the field, and worked beside students as they learned to document and interview people in the middle of their hardest days. Nothing I can assign on campus teaches the responsibility of representing someone fairly as directly as standing next to a student while they try to do it.

I believe method should be visible. I teach students to ask not only what a source says but who made it, under what constraints, and in whose interest, the same questions I bring to my own feminist history. This holds as true for a news article or a government archive as for a family photograph. When students learn to read a source as a positioned claim rather than a settled fact, they gain a skill that outlasts any single class.

Much of my teaching has been about access, making feminist and gender studies legible to students who assumed it was not for them. As an administrator I saw how often that gap ran along disciplinary lines, with students in the sciences quietly steered away from these questions. I design my courses to meet those students where they are, treating gender, power, and conflict as analytic tools anyone can use rather than a vocabulary reserved for specialists.

I came to the classroom from decades in newsrooms and from fieldwork in a war zone, and I have trained hundreds of journalists in settings where the stakes of getting a story right were immediate and sometimes dangerous. That experience shapes what I expect of students, precision, fairness, and the courage to pursue a question that matters. My aim is not to hand them conclusions but to send them out able to find, question, and tell the stories others have overlooked.

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