Bhumi Patel

407.276.0686 | bhumi.b.patel@gmail.com
Teaching Philosophy
I am a dangerous educator. I am committed to creating accessible and inclusive
learning environments to support and empower students to think deeply and critically
to engage the intellectual and social challenges of their time. The creative mind is a
powerful tool toward systematic and cultural change when given the opportunity to
both be challenged and thrive. My teaching is grounded in an equity-based, social
justice-oriented, trauma-informed framework. For me, this allows for the creation of
both both a safe learning environment and promotion of empowerment and agency for
each student that I teach.

To create an equitable, social justice-oriented, trauma-informed learning environment,

I engage in the following practices:

I practice teaching and modeling consent where, as the instructor, I always ask
for consent to physically adjust a student and ask that all students do the same for
their peers in lessons that involve partnering in movement.

I review these protocols often to remind students that their consent can change.

I engage students in discussion of our lineages and relationships to the

movement form being taught in the classroom, with particular attention paid to
movement forms that are rooted in communities of color.

I build into the curriculum alternatives for both emotionally vulnerable

moments in class and accessibility needs embedded in the non-competitive
environment geared toward individual learning and growth.

I value my students as they come, stripped of any judgment or prejudice.

As a queer, woman of color, I have been marked enough – different, an outlier,

unworthy, less than. I have always known of the existence of that privileged scarlet
letter. It follows me around throughout the world, but more importantly at
predominately white institutions of higher education; I am marked as “different”
within that space not because I am different, but because the space is filled with
whiteness. I refuse to be philosophically or pedagogically adjusted based on whiteness.
To be adjusted would mean being shamed, silenced. I will not mark, shame, or silence
students in my classroom.

I ask students to engage in the progress of freeing ideas, freeing their bodies, freeing
their imaginations. I want them to be challenged, not just by the work within the
classroom, but the work that we must do outside the classroom to respond to our
sociopolitical moment. I want the work we do to conceptually adjust, disorient,
unhinge them. My responsibility is to enable students to bring new knowledge to their
lives, and then encourage them to take the responsibility of using the tools I provide. A
classroom is a collective pursuit of knowledge rather than an omniscient teacher
sharing capital T truths.

In my classroom, I refuse to be silent in the face of racism, in the face of sexist and
patriarchal hegemony, its subtle and systematic structure. I refuse to stay silent at the
denigration of women’s bodies and non-binary bodies, or about the ways in which toxic
masculinity has cultivated the assumptions about how bodies should take up space in
the world. I refuse to be silent when it comes to holding space for the existential and
psychosomatic dread and chaos experienced by those who are targets of bigotry. I
refuse to be silent when it comes to queer and transgender folks who are targets of
violence simply by existing. I refuse to be silent in a world where children are targets
of sexual gaze and violence and where those with disabilities are mocked and still
rendered “monstrous,” and where the earth suffers because some of us refuse to hear
its suffering, where in many places, my ideas are marked as dangerous.

If it is dangerous to teach my students that all bodies are good bodies, to teach them to
practice kindness to one another, to learn and exercise consent, to bring social justice
into their art practices, to think critically about their positions in the world, then I am
a dangerous educator and what I teach is dangerous.