teaching

Why and How I Teach:

I teach to get FREE, individually, communally, and ancestrally.  

I value REST, JOY, and Intergenerational healing. 

My pedagogy synthesizes my 15+ years experience as a hxstory teacher, mental health worker, spiritual practitioner,  rest and joy practitioner, street dancer, and interdisciplinary artist.  I blend decolonial hxstorical research, ethnography, trauma informed facilitation, movement, adornment, and sound to heal myself and BIPOC communities locally, statewide, and transnationally. I am a self reflective practitioner who creates from internal wellness through researching and practicing rest liberation practices to undo the white supremacist hetero-patriarchal capitalistic grind culture embedded into every aspect of our lives. Through restful design, I strategically plan sustainable impact and care for communities. Through critical pedagogy, installation, sound and somatics, I position community members as knowledge holders and creators versus spectators. This trauma informed shift in power allows participants to exercise agency, humanization, empathy, and take creative risks to generate new healing narratives. I create multimodal installations and learning containers that sonically, kinesthetically, and visually help communities heal. Epigenetic studies have shown that we can heal generations forward and back through exposing individuals to new experiences, relationships, and spaces.  While creating new narratives with community, I celebrate and honor the liberation technologies my ancestors and BIPOC communities have practiced for centuries. I love booming bass, 99 cent stores, bright colors, swap meets, the streets, regal beauty aesthetics passed down from grandmothers, parades, processions, and song. My work cocreates new worlds through archiving, remixing, and uplifting diasporic resilience technologies which hold the hidden codes of freedom which have kept BIPOC communities alive and thriving throughout hxstory. 

I have created and facilitated learning environments in public schools, artistic fellowships, mental health environments, senior centers, public performances, dance studios, and night life settings.  I believe our healing and learning can exist in all spaces, the kitchen, the altar, the streets, the stage, the living room and the classroom.  Where we learn and grow, is where the people are. 

I'm grateful to have learned from many mentors such as my father Ricardo Duero Tolentino, my grandmothers Consuelo Duero Tolentino and Eduvijis Pangan Janabajal, Betty's Daughter Arts Collaborative, Ebony Noelle Golden, Cynthia Renta, Kamalayan Collective, People's Education Movement, Patrick Camangian, Wayne Yang, Walang Hiya NYC, Time 2 Rock Crew, Soul Heavy Crew, House of Tastea, and the many dance communities throughout the Bay Area, San Diego, CA, and New York, NY just to name a few.  

I have taught/co taught courses such as:

K-12
Ethnic Studies
World History
US History
AP US History
Creative Movement
Yoga for Youth
Dance as Resistance
Hip Hop
Dances Around the World
Hip Hop Theatre
World Beats
Young Women's Empowerment Through Dance

Workshops
B - Girling at UCSD Women's Center and for UPAC
Walang Hiya: Movement as Medicine
Walang Hiya: What is Walang Hiya? 
Walang Hiya: Framing Our Learning, Transmuting Shame Into Wellness
Solidarity Across Movements

Artistic Learning Containers / Fellowships
Walang Hiya: Transmuting Shame into Wellness (8 Month Fellowship)
Olongapo Disco: Community Joy Listening and Archiving (3 Month Learning Series)
Olongapo Disco 2.0 Summer 2023 (1 month Learning Series)
Olongapo Disco 3.0 Summer 2024 

Curriculum
​Freedom for One, Freedom for All? with the National Endowment for Humanities Summer Institute
Pinay Narratives and Topics in Radical Feminisms with Kamalayan Kollective at UCSD

Curre

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