Teaching from the Heart: Education as Liberation

In every lesson, honor the human story. 

At a very young age, I began to teach in an untutored and natural way.

My work has always been rooted in people. Before curriculum, before policies, before institutions, there are lives. I have made it a personal responsibility to stay close to the pulse of the people I serve. Who are they? What do they carry? What are their dreams, their needs, and their conditions? How can I stand beside them, not above them, in their journey? 

To teach in a human way requires something beyond technique. It asks me to wade into my own humanity and to swim in the deep waters of the human condition. Whether I was organizing in community spaces, working in nonprofits, teaching in college classrooms, sitting with men and women inside carceral facilities, or navigating the semi polished halls of academia, I have encountered suffering. I have also encountered extraordinary courage, resilience, and transformation. 

I have learned from the intimate exchange that happens when people share pieces of their lives. Through higher education I learned to connect the dots and to see how history, context, systems, and structures shape our everyday realities. This is what sociologists call the sociological imagination. But for me, it is more than theory. It is theory in the flesh. It is seeing people wholly, not as data or deficit, but as complex beings shaped by their social world.  

I believe in the human spirit’s potential when opportunity, readiness, care, and support intersect. I have had the privilege of sitting front row to transformation, witnessing the brilliance, faith, and power of my students, many of whom the world once ignored, forgotten or dismissed. That is my why. I stay in this work because people are not broken. They are always becoming. 

I Teach Because I Believe in People 

I teach because I believe in people. I believe in their capacity to grow, to heal, to rise, and to reclaim what was once buried or dismissed. Teaching with deep intention and conviction has asked everything of me, and in return it has given me a life rooted in purpose and abundant love.  

There is a quiet joy that lives in this work. I feel it when students begin to question the world around them with courage. I feel it when I watch them engage with ideas that awaken something inside them, when theory meets life and suddenly everything connects. I feel it when they carry knowledge home to their children, their partners, their mothers and elders, their homies, their communities. I feel it when they step into leadership roles. Learning that stays only in the classroom was never learning at all. Education is meant to move. It is meant to travel through generations. It is meant to return us to ourselves. 

What an honor it is to witness transformation up close. To watch a student discover their voice and then use it to shape their future. To see them apply their education with integrity and purpose. To celebrate their breakthroughs, both big and small. This work has stretched me, humbled me, and surprised me with love in places I never expected to find it. 

I am grateful. To teach is to participate in the becoming of others while still becoming myself. For that, I remain one very lucky human.