TEACHING

Dr. Battle's commitment to embodying the teacher-scholar model is grounded in her fundamental commitment to justice and liberation for oppressed groups. Her commitment to a liberatory praxis, especially and including in the classroom, means that she designs her courses around three important principles: 1) helping students to identify and understand the dynamics of power, inequality, and oppression in the criminal legal system, and society more broadly; 2) helping students localize and contextualize their understanding of power, inequality, and oppression; and 3) helping students (re)imagine what neighborhoods, communities, and society broadly speaking would look like free of that oppression. To achieve these goals, cultivating a reciprocal learning space in which students are building community and engaging in self-reflection while being motivated to be active learners and challenged to meet high academic standards is crucial.

 

Dr. Battle believes strongly in cross-disciplinary collaboration, and to this end worked with Wake Forest University faculty in Interdisciplinary Humanities and Studio Art to bring students from each department together on a group project working through the question, "How is Wake Forest possible?" Students engaged with the university's relationship to slavery, the prison industrial complex, and contemporary invisible labor, as well as the legacy of Black activism on campus. The students' journeys working together were captured in a digital humanities project. Her students have also conducted open-to-the-public virtual teach-ins and collaborated with grassroots organizations through experiential learning projects, culminating in an open-to-the-public community forum called "Activating the Academy."

 

In addition to teaching courses such as Courts and Criminal Procedure in the Era of Mass Incarceration, Reimagining Justice, Feminist Research with Confined Communities, and Social Justice in Theory, Method, and Practice, Dr. Battle has been an instructor for the McNair Scholars Program at Temple University, and Project L/Earn and the Paul Robeson Leadership Institute at Rutgers University. These three programs provide underrepresented and first-generation undergraduates with intensive research experiences. In addition, she has worked as a learning specialist with student-athletes for writing courses and study skills.