teaching

I've taught in a range of places, and with a range of learners: young students (10-17 years, in Accra, Ghana), high school (secondary) students (Washington DC),  and undergraduate, masters and first-year PhD students (in Accra, Ghana; Sheffield, London, and Edinburgh, UK). In my teaching, students and I think about space and place by together reading, looking, listening, feeling with and discussing a range of knowledge materials. From our different situated positions, we ask critical questions, and we learn together to produce knowledge that matters to us and that intervenes in the world we live.

Lecturer in Black Geographies
School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh (2023-present)

I teach a first-year Human Geography course, a third-year “field trip” that takes students to Belfast, Ireland, a third and fourth-year Black Geographies course, and I supervise students in their final-year dissertations.

In 2024, I was nominated by five students for a University Teaching Award for my teaching on the first-year Human Geography course. In 2025, I was recognized by my department’s undergraduate student society for producing classroom experiences in Black Geographies that inspired students’ voice, emphasizing critical thinking and creativity through site-specific projects.

Lecturer in Human Geography
Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University (2021-22)

My teaching spanned advising (supervising) undergraduate students on their dissertations, developing and adapting lecture content, designing and running seminars, and co-designing and co-running hands-on visits in UK cities (including co-devising a mapping project to explore economic change in Manchester, UK; site visits and a self-directed walking tour exploring racial histories and presents in Sheffield, UK; and leading multi-day trip exploring economic, social, and geographic change in London neighborhoods). I taught on a range of undergraduate courses (Approaches to Human Geography, Geographies of the Everyday, Explorations in Urban Geography, Key Concepts in Social Science).

Accra Architecture Writing Workshop – Writing Tutor
University of Ghana at Legon (2018, 2019)

For two consecutive summers, I was part of an international team of academics and PhD students who organized and ran an intensive week-long writing architecture research and writing workshop for Ghanaian and Nigerian undergraduate, masters, and PhD students in Accra, Ghana. Focused on building students’ research, writing, and engagement with contemporary and heritage architecture in Accra, I worked with a small group of students who conducted intensive on-site and desk research in order to produce critical short essays.

Graduate Teaching Assistant & Tutor
Sheffield School of Architecture, University of Sheffield (2017-2021)

During my PhD, I taught across undergraduate architecture and urban design masters courses.

In Trajectories in Urban Design (ARC6975) (2021): Drawing on critical questions of the anthropocene, coloniality, racism, and patriarchy in shaping spatial injustice, this masters-level module (course) positioned urban design within the complex interrelated processes and systems that shape the city. I supported students as they took a specific geographic site and design issue, and developed design responses alongside reflections on their own design practice.

In the Masters in Urban Design Thesis Studio focused on “Reclaiming the City,” I supported students in learning and doing that blends design and research approaches. In their projects, they developed urban design approaches to address real-world design issues, developing their own urban design practice grounded in theory to produce a theoretically informed, critical and creative design intervention.

In Critical Spatial Theory (ARC6971), students learned how feminist methodologies and tools can be used to propose “situated practices” as means of analysing place. In this course, we worked through feminist and decolonial scholarship, looking at themes including space/power, intersectionality, spatial tactics/use, interiority/care, and making/writing as means to explore gender, difference, care and diversity within spatial politics and everyday practice. As teaching assistant, I facilitated student-led discussions to support lectures, as well as one-on-one tutorials.

For Urban (Hi)Stories, I prepared and delivered a guest lecture each fall semester to undergraduate architecture students, focusing on theory, design practice and drawing on my research in Accra, Ghana. I traced the colonial mobilities of architecture, modernity and assumptions about the modern city and its design, progress, and development; presented and explored postcolonial criticism and coloniality via the experiences of architecture and design. (first lecture in 2017, invited back in 2018 and 2019)

In a first-semester course for masters and first-year PhD students (Principles of Research Design), I introduced the core elements of research design for the social sciences discipline. Each two-hour session was taught as a blend between lecture and seminar. I supported lectures and facilitated students’ small group discussions.

In collaboration with the Cairo, Egypt-based architectural firm CLUSTER (Cairo Lab for Urban Studies and Environmental Research), I helped teach a masters-level urban design studio focused on inclusive interventions for three heritage sites within the city’s downtown: a city market, theatre, and residential building. As Teaching Assistant, I supported the week-long trip to Cairo and provided weekly feedback to students in the design studio to support their design progress.

Akwaaba Photo Youth Photography Workshop
Workshop and Exhibition Co-Organizer (October-January 2017)

Rita Garglo (No Limits Charity Organization), Teresa Meka (independent professional photographer), and I organized a series of photography workshop sessions with youth (10-17 years) in their neighborhood of Ga Mashie (in Accra, Ghana). Over a six-week period, we met Saturday mornings for training sessions, photo walks, and presentation and discussion of the children’s photographs. Worked with museum specialist Chanelle Nicole Frazier to organize the Akwaaba Photography Youth Photography Exhibition in January 2017.

Visit the exhibition website here: akwaaba.photography