Institution at the time of Award: Birkbeck, University of London.
Jennifer is Deputy Director of the Centre for Transformative Practice in Learning and Teaching at Birkbeck, University of London. Her background is in Latin American and Gender Studies.
Jennifer is a founding member of the Birkbeck Critical Pedagogies Group and a member of the Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality steering group. She currently leads on Learning Development for students and Academic Development across the College, with a focus on facilitating communities of practice. Jennifers work is grounded in three overlapping principles.
Impact of work
First, her work is motivated by a desire to create inclusive practices that make higher education accessible to learners from non-traditional backgrounds through creating institutional and classroom cultures that embrace development, instead of deficit, models of learning. Second, she believes that transformation requires relationships of mutuality in which everyone - students, teachers and institutions - are open to learning and changing. Third, Jennifer is committed to a feminist and queer ethos of teaching that is grounded in collaborative practices and non-hierarchical methods, which, in turn, require attentiveness to power and how it shapes classroom and institutional relations. Working with these principles has allowed Jennifer to embed critical approaches to learning and teaching in the classroom, in staff development and institutional policies.
Plans for the future
Jennifer is currently working on a new inclusive curriculum project that aims to challenge us to think about what it means to be learning and teaching in institutions with multi-racial, gender and ability-diverse student bodies. The project asks how an intersectional critical pedagogies approach can offer us new possibilities for transformation in the curriculum and involves collaborations between students and staff. In January Jennifer will move to the University of Westminster to take up a post as Principal Lecturer and Director of Student Partnership.