I believe in the transformative power of teaching and mentoring as sites for advancing social justice. UCSB is a Minority Serving Institution, and I have a special commitment to supporting students who have been marginalized in traditional higher education. In 2020 I mentored a young trans person with a community program in Melbourne that works with young people at risk. During my time at UCSB, I have mentored groups of trans and queer students to develop research skills and projects investigating the experiences of trans students at UCSB, which resulted in an interim report (Zimman et al. 2021); I have been an instructor for the Foundations in the Humanities Prison Correspondence Program, teaching 20 incarcerated men foundational courses in literary studies via prison correspondence letters; and I have been an instructor for the School Kids Investigating Language in Life and Society (SKILLS) educational justice program, for which I collaborated with an Education PhD student and mentored four undergraduate students to teach a class on linguistic justice with 30 first-generation college-bound Latinx/e high school students who I then mentored through their first research projects; and I mentored a high school student for the UCSB Research Mentorship Program, where we developed a research project on trans Reddit communities. 

I have substantial experience teaching and developing instruction materials, having taught undergraduate classes for five years and tutored and mentored high school students for eight years. I have been the sole instructor for three classes, including the upper division course Language, Gender, and Sexuality (55 students) and the lower division course Language and Power (115 students). In these classes, I designed syllabi that engaged students in applying theoretical concepts around gender and systemic power to their own lives, as well as supervising teaching assistants. Additionally, I have been a teaching assistant for 10 classes in a range of areas. While at UCSB, I have also been the instructor of a graduate-level teaching course, wherein I mentored 20 PhD students across the humanities in developing their syllabi and developing teaching materials, as well as running a series of pedagogical workshops.  In 2024 I received a competitive campus-wide Excellence in Teaching Award from the Graduate Student Association at UCSB, which was supported by recommendation letters from faculty and undergraduate students.

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