Teaching
Philosophy
Teaching is a sincere passion. My goal in every classroom is to create a responsive learning space where students can develop critical thinking skills and walk away with meaningful, transferable abilities — not just course credit.
I prioritize active learning, provocative questions, and building trust through personal engagement and humor. I adapt to individual learning styles and work to make general education courses feel like genuine intellectual experiences rather than requirements to be cleared. Failure for me is when a student's voice is lost.
I draw on evidence-based methods and years of teaching across widely different contexts — high school, community college, research university, private tutoring, and international ESL instruction.
From the Classroom
Featured Project
English as a Medium of Instruction Program
As part of USP's push to internationalize its curriculum, I built and ran an English as a Medium of Instruction program through AUCANI, the university's international cooperation agency. The work had two main pieces: an online course for over 100 faculty members who were shifting their classes from Portuguese to English, and a series of in-person conferences and workshops for more than 50 professors across departments. Both strands were developed in partnership with the US Department of State English Language Fellows program, which placed me at USP as a visiting scholar.
Courses
University of São Paulo
Linguistics
- Topics of Semantics
- Topics of Research in English Linguistics
- Phonetics & Phonology
Applied Linguistics
- Topics in Applied Linguistics
- Topics in Discourse Analysis
- English as a Medium of Instruction (online, synchronous & asynchronous)
English
- Academic Writing
- Written Expression in English
- Oral Expression in English
- Pronunciation of English
University of California, Los Angeles
Applied Linguistics
- Language in Action
- Language and Social Interaction
- Language & Gender
- Language Learning and Teaching
- The Nature of Language
- Translation and Interpreting
- Talk and the Body
Linguistics
- The Study of Language
- Linguistic Humor: Amusing and Abusing with Language
- Introduction to Linguistic Analysis
- Language and Society: Introduction to Sociolinguistics
English as a Second Language
- Academic Writing
- Academic Interaction
- Public Speaking
- Pronunciation
- English Through Language, Culture and Society
- Speaking/Listening for Business English (Anderson School of Business)
Santa Monica College
English as a Second Language
- Basic English II
- English Fundamentals II