Teaching

UC Santa Barbara

For over twenty years, Maestra Moraga served as an Artist in Residence in the Department of Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University.  There she mentored a full generation of now published writers and professional playwrights who credit Moraga as one of their most influential teachers. In 2017, la Maestra began her tenure as a Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where with her artistic partner, Celia Herrera Rodríguez, she has instituted  Las Maestras: Center for Xicana Indigenous Thought and Art Practice.

Beginning in Fall 2018, Maestra Moraga, in collaboration with other faculty, instituted a Creative Writing Specialization in the Department of English. Of her approach to the program, Moraga writes:  

The impact of teaching where the creative process is integral to critical thinking (and vice versa) promises to be transformative for an emergent generation of students for whom natural disasters and global mass migrations are the new normal.  A generation, as Margaret Korvach (Paqua/Okanese) writes, who are “seeking ways to understand the world without harming it.”

For more information see https://www.lasmaestrascenter.ucsb.edu/specializations

Moraga’ creative writing class, Fall 2019
Inaugural Fellows. Moraga and Celia Herrera Rodríguez, front row, center..

 

Celia Herrera Rodríguez lights medicine to open LMC’s first “Enseñanza” with UCSB students.

As UCSB is now a “Hispanic” serving Institution, we are enthusiastically responding in kind.  Our task, as we see it, is to help Latino/a/x communities remember their origins through the act of art making and critical collective thought and action.  In our many decades of teaching and art practice, we have witnessed over and over again, that through public pedagogy, young people become empowered to create a literature, a theater, a visual rendering and a daily social practice that counters the impoverishment and cultural amnesia of globalization.  It’s the most and best that we, as Maestras and artists, have to give.

Las Maestras Center official site