My teaching philosophy centers on the acceptance of difference, which draws from my training in critical social theory, feminist methodologies, and ethnographic sensibilities. I believe that critical pedagogical methods are tools that enable students to identify inequalities and structures of power at multiple scales. To locate these spatial processes, my teaching methodology is guided by field-based and experiential learning practices.
My teaching interests lie at the intersections of place, borders, everyday politics, belonging, urban life, geopolitics, indigeneity, and human-environment interactions. Acknowledging multiple ways of learning, writing, and engaging with global problems, I employ a diversity of assignments in my courses that emphasize action and intellectual engagement. In addition to a focus on in-class discussions, students work on peer-reviewed writing assignments, group mapmaking projects, visual projects (example: zines and fact sheets), film responses, and “walking as method” exercises that necessitate being in space and learning by doing.
As a first-generation and Indigenous scholar, I am aware of various social and legal challenges faced by underrepresented populations. Guided by this positionality, I realize that students come from culturally diverse backgrounds. My teaching goal is to foster active learning environments that value these varied life experiences so that students can work together in accepting differences and questioning implicit and naturalized biases. I am an inaugural member of Aruna Global South through which I am continuously learning and conversing on themes of justice and belonging with other underrepresented Asian scholars. I am committed to mentoring students from diverse backgrounds in their research projects, student-led events on ideas of difference and belonging, and professional development.
COURSES DESIGNED AND TAUGHT
Indigenous Futures
Spring 2023 (Macalester College) | Spring 2024 (Simon Fraser University)
Indigenous Futures ruptures the notion that there is one linear future thinking and future making for all Indigenous communities globally. Through immersion in literature and media from Indigenous scholars, storytellers, photographers, filmmakers, and digital artists, students will engage in the multiple ways in which Indigenous communities regionally and globally imagine their futurities. Although the course content draws from material from the US and globally, the central way of learning is through engagement with Indigenous ways of being in the Twin Cities. Through digital projects, students will have opportunities to study and visualize how Indigenous peoples conceptualize their future by re-telling community histories of solidarity against state/police violence, navigating climate justice, and imagining new forms of belonging.
Visual Storytelling: Researching with Digital and Visual Materials and Creating Visual Narratives
Fall 2022 (Macalester College)
Central to research is storytelling. This course provides the theoretical and methodological toolkits that students will use to conduct visual research in Geography and the Social Sciences. Drawing on Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies, the course surveys topics including research ethics, visual culture, discourse analysis, digital methods, participant observation and community-based research practices, and visual representation. Students will develop skills to observe, record, and analyze issues and processes in the local community in the Twin Cities through semester-long visual research projects by making still (photography) and moving (film) images. In addition, students will work on individual and group projects for hands-on experience on other digital methods.
Everyday Politics in South Asia | Political Geographies of South Asia
Spring 2022 (Eckerd College) | Fall 2022 (Macalester College)
This course provides interdisciplinary textual and visual materials to examine historical and contemporary processes through which to understand everyday politics in South Asia. Students will learn from academic writing, documentary photography, and film that are based in South Asia, particularly in the states of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. This course examines how South Asia is not a fixed place or a timeless regional entity. Rather, drawing on Doreen Massey’s “a global sense of place”, students will learn about South Asia through the lens of relationality, transnational flows, and local-global connections of humans and non-humans. Topics include indigeneity, development, memory, nation, bureaucracy, religion, gender, youth, political ecology, urban life.
Borders and Belonging
Fall 2021 (Eckerd College) | Spring 2023 (Macalester College)
This course provides an interdisciplinary material (texts and visuals) to understand how the ideas of borders and belonging are interconnected. While borders demarcate a particular national territory, it necessitates the construction of curated national imaginaries and forms of belonging. These practices of belonging and bordering simultaneously construct “the other” in immigration policies and national discourse. This course studies the political, social, economic, and affective underpinnings of processes that construct borders and belonging at multiple scales: from the local to the global. Course topics include borders, belonging, migration, sovereignty, territory, nationalism, and refugees.
Urban Politics: Who is the City For?
Winter 2022 (Eckerd College)
The UN projects that 68% of the world population will inhabit urban areas by the year 2050. Cities globally and in the US will face increased infrastructural and ecological constraints and political and social inequalities. In this context, this course examines urban politics by asking: Who is the City For? The course seeks to think with this question while imagining a non-sexist and an anti-racist city through an immersion in the varied literatures of ethnography, film, documentary photography, and manifesto that are based in urban spaces globally and in the United States. The course is a study of how human experiences in urban spaces are conditioned by intersectional identities. Topics include power, privilege, migration, labor, race, redlining, homelessness, gentrification, policing and surveillance, solidarity, right to the city
Human Geographies
Summer 2021, online (University of Colorado Boulder) | Spring 2023 (Macalester College)
Human Geographies is an introductory course to understand key concepts in the sub-discipline of Human Geography. Students examine social, political, economic, and cultural processes to shape how spatial processes shape everyday lives. Course materials discuss key concepts including place, space, culture, landscape, migration, geopolitics, colonialism, and indigeneity. Students interpret the relationships among patterns and processes at multiple scales from the global to the local. In their assignments, analyze, discuss, and write about contemporary geographic issues. In addition to readings, students watch and post discussions on visual materials (films and photography) throughout the course with the aim of learning about the geographies of the world from multiple perspectives beyond the textual.
Mountain Geography
Summer 2020, Spring 2022, online (University of Colorado Boulder)
Mountain Geography is a bridge between the natural and social sciences on topics like erosion, climate migration, securitization, and borderlands pertaining to mountain spaces. I designed and taught the course as an Instructor, drawing on Dr. Peter Blanken’s pedagogy that aims to bring together the natural and social worlds of mountains. Through engagements with scholarship that crosses disciplinary boundaries, I introduced the students to problem sets in the world that could be identified and worked with from multiple perspectives. For instance, my discussions and lectures highlight that climate migration is not only a “natural” phenomenon of ecological loss but a process that precipitates dispossession of peoples, and their memories and histories of place and time. Such conversations at the intersection of natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities elicit the significance of interdisciplinary learning in a rapidly changing world. I allocated a section of the course to think with the students about contemporary issues of security and development in mountain communities across the globe.
World Regional Geographies
Summer 2017 (University of Colorado Boulder)
For World Regional Geography - a course that explores world regions through global and local processes in the making - the reading and visual materials were influenced by Frantz Fanon’s work on deconstructing colonial power and identity. I introduced the students not only to colonial processes that shape various regions of the world, but also to how coloniality, empire, and race shape everyday geographies at the local scale in Boulder, Colorado. I incorporated community and experiential learning into the classroom by collaborating with a local homelessness advocate. We walked with the students on a placemaking exercise around Downtown Boulder to engage with how people who are homeless interact and engage with the city, and to understand how advocates are organizing to strive for homelessness. Borrowing from my own visual research on homelessness, I incorporated Participant Observation to teach students how multiple intersections - economic, cultural, social, and political - make a community and how a place can be realized, felt, occupied, and experienced differently.
STUDENT TESTIMONIALS
“Rupak has been nothing but great! Always available for questions, discussions, etc. Had us learn by doing which is awesome. Did a great job making every class interesting.”
“Your knowledge and willingness to answer questions and such during this course has been greatly appreciated!”
“You’ve been great! You make the material very interesting.”
“Your attitude is exactly what I needed! Keep being an awesome person.”
“ONE OF THE BEST INSTRUCTORS I’VE EVER HAD!”
“Rupak was willing to meet outside of recitation to help with coursework questions which was helpful.”
“This is my 4th year, and he is one of the best TA’s I’ve had. Very smart guy.”
“Rupak Shrestha was a great TA throughout the semester. He was always available and responded very quickly if you needed help with anything. I needed clarifications on my citations for a paper and emailed him the day it was due, and he still took time to clearly show me exactly what I needed for success. Rupak also graded our tests and papers incredibly fast!!! This was the fastest turn around time for any test I have taken here at CU Boulder, and this test wasn't even a scantron! He had to read through a lot of material, but I do feel he was a very fair grader and if you had questions he would work with you to clarify. One of the most helpful and efficient TAs at the school.”
“I think both instructors for this course were incredible. They encouraged original and critical thinking, and challenged students to think about the way they experience the world.”
“Rupak did an excellent job as TA, and his feedback on my assignments made me better at critically evaluating my own thinking. I really loved the course, and it's one of those rare classes that I feel has made me a better person and a more engaged citizen.”
“Great films, loved field trips, good assignments”
“Very helpful when needed. Thanks for grading and for teaching!”
“Great TA. No issues at all, stepped up at the beginning of the year as Blanken was on field studies…Rupak Shrestha had a brief lecture tenure in this class, and was well informed.”
“Rupak was very responsive and available to the students in the class. He did a great job introducing the students to the subject of the course for the first two weeks while Professor Blanken was doing research out of the country. He shares many similar styles of instruction with Professor Blanken.”
“The recitation was almost pointless if you went to lecture but you did an amazing job of giving students opportunity and access to information. You’re really nice!”
“Super chill, great teacher. Teaches well”
“Great teacher. Even greater guy.”
“Rupak is seriously the best. No questions asked.”
“Rupak is awesome. I love him and he makes class fun.”
“Very helpful in office hours and responded to emails quickly & clearly”
“Rupak was very kind and easy to work with when I went to talk to him outside of class.”
“Was a great instructor and kept me interested in the topics.”
“Genuinely Nice”
Incorporating Student Feedback in the Classroom
“Although I enjoyed the films, they were a bit depressing.”
- While incorporating visual materials in the classroom, I realized that I include materials that are “a bit depressing”. Recently - and more so after Dr. Jennifer Fluri and I co-authored a book-chapter on how people employ humor to make do with uncertainty in their lives - I have included visual materials that not only highlight the plights of precarious lives globally but also illustrate how people engage with the world around them playfully and with much agency.
“Give more feedback on graded work. Make it clear how each piece of work will be graded with rubrics.”
- During the course design phase, I now explicitly outline how an assignment fits into the larger narrative of the course. I include and discuss rubrics with students so that they realize expectations. I focus on comparative feedback models, through which I borrow from my previous assignment feedback to students and provide new comments on how their analytical and writing skills have improved. This model gives students an understanding on their own learning trajectories throughout the course.
“I loved the course to be interesting however the 3 weeks time constraint limited the amount of learning about each region of the world”.
- I received this comment during a three-week long summer intensive course on World Regional Geographies. The learning objectives for this course was to examine and analyze spatial processes in the world rather than to list encyclopedic knowledges about each and every region of the world. So although the course focused on various regions of the world, I emphasized the connectivity and disruptions created by coloniality globally. If I were to teach this class again in the future, I would incorporate one or more analytical lens (e.g., mobility), in addition to coloniality, to analyze how although we tend to think of the world in regions, these regions are intimately tied to one another. I believe that the students will have a broad regional yet thematically and theoretically focused learning experience in understanding the world.
“In class when presenting, please speak clearly through the entire class, sometimes you mumble or trail off”
- Since this feedback, I made it a point to have a loud voice so that students at the back can hear me clearly and concisely and at the same time the loudness is not unbearable for the students seated at the front.
“When creating PowerPoints, use a tan background and large font”
- As a visual thinker, I think about how colors, placements of texts, and images convey particular emotions and meanings. After receiving this comment, I have researched on the efficacy of colors, fonts, and visual formats to incorporate into presentation materials.
*If you require detailed evaluation reports, I would be happy to share the official Faculty Course Questionnaires provided by the University of Colorado Boulder, Eckerd College, and Macalester College.