I’ve been teaching college for 10 years now, and I’ve been teaching full-time at PCC since 2016. I truly love what I do, this is my dream job! Honestly, I pinch myself because I can’t believe I get paid to do this every day (I know, gushy!). I teach Women’s and Gender Studies 101 both in person and through Distance Learning, as well as Queer Studies, Women, Social Change and Activism, and Intercultural Women’s Studies (my favorite!!). I am including some sample syllabi at the bottom of this page in case it helps you get a feel for how I teach.
I was born and raised in Costa Rica, so you get to hear a LOT of stories about Costa Rica and Latin America when I’m around. I love getting to compare various cultures, looking at things that are similar and different. My background has been in Community Psychology and Gender, and I’m very interested in youth and sexuality, HIV prevention, power differentials and gender roles, pedagogy, psychedelics and psilocybin. Some of my activism has revolved around globalization, economic exploitation, migration, and I currently work as a Sex Positive Organizer.
I’ve become a bit of a teaching nerd; I’m always trying to figure out better ways to teach social justice. This is my life’s passion; my secret goal is that I’ll get to change the world through YOU! I figure if I can get YOU inspired to help me change the world, we’ll get much further. As a teacher, my focus is to help you connect the ideas we talk about with your own lives. My background is in popular education, so I really love finding materials that speak to you in YOUR language, about things YOU care about. I don’t use a traditional textbook in class for a few different reasons: it’s a social justice issue for me, the cost of textbooks can keep students out of classes, and I want to make the class available to as many students as possible. Textbooks also have a tendency to tone down controversy in order to sell to a wide audience, using curated materials lets me really focus on the most important ideas. Using online materials lets me give students a chance to chew new ideas for a while before applying them to specific scenarios, and I find that it helps the learning go much deeper. In class I try to speak from stories, and connect the material to my own experience as much as possible. As a feminist, it’s important to me to question my own process and I try to model that for you in class, so don’t be surprised to hear about my own social identities or how I’ve wrestled with some of the same questions you might have.
I’ve been working with a flipped-classroom methodology, which is sometimes described as doing the lecture at home, and the homework in class. I find this method useful because some of the ideas in Women’s Studies can be overwhelming and shocking, and this lets me do the shock and awe at home, and leaves the valuable in-person time for applied problem-solving. During class time, students are mostly working in small groups to solve problems and brainstorm applications, and we debrief as a large group a few times per session.
On a personal note, I’ve been doing ceramics for 28 (!) years, and I feel so lucky that we have amazing ceramics facilities at PCC. Being from a tropical country, I have a bit of an obsession with the ‘exotic’ (loaded word!) fruits I find here: cherries, raspberries, marionberries, blueberries, and I try to eat as many as I can through the summer. I’m also routinely shocked by the way seasons change and I can never get used to sunset at 9:30pm. Some of my absolutely favorite things to do are to spend a whole day garage-saleing, or going to the Goodwill bins, or to SCRAP for another hoard of crafting materials that I mean to get around to playing with. I’m excited to meet all of you, please call me Jimena (hee-MEN-ah)
This video will give you an idea of what the class is like:
I made a website for people interested in social justice, and I’ve been working on getting all my teaching materials uploaded to share, so you can take a peek at my syllabi and lots of materials at http://www.EverydaySocialJustice.com