Dr. Etem’s teaching philosophy follows bell hooks’s philosophy of “teaching as a movement against and beyond boundaries.” In her courses, she create spaces to encourage students to go beyond the boundaries between known and unknown as they develop critical media literacy and production skills. These spaces grow out of assignments and activities that challenge students to question “what is known” while becoming familiar with “what is unknown.” To complement the activities, she leads discussions and responds to students’ assignments with respect and openness. 

Interdisciplinarity is a crucial component of her teaching. Reading across the disciplines empowers students to develop a critical voice to engage with the critical discourse surrounding production. This helps students to think creatively, take risks, experiment with different types of media, and find their own voice. 

In her teaching materials she also incorporate non-elite and non-hegemonic narratives to center the perspectives of historically underrepresented scholars and marginalized populations. She is committed to anti-oppressive pedagogy and ability to empower students to practice critical media literacy.

It is important to me to blend production with research in all kinds of classrooms. For example, nonfiction production is a component of her media courses to help develop students’ research skills, online presence, and public engagement. Her students at Emerson used digital archival platforms and historical collections to identify the industrial, technological, and social conditions that created opportunities and constraints for production, distribution, exhibition and reception. Consequently, they produced digital portfolios, functioned as curators, acted as journalists-in the making, and contributed to public knowledge while learning about media history. (See the class hashtag #vm100withprofetem on Instagram.)

Together with my students, she creates safe spaces for contradictions to emerge and set the tone for open-mindedness and respect for generating productive discussions and learning moments. She trains students to think critically about the production context in relation to representations of voice, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, and religion. Indeed, when she taught the course Screening Race and Ethnicity at Indiana University, she helped students to interrogate media representations of Black, Brown, Latinx, Asian, Indigenous peoples, immigrant, refugee, LGBTQ+, and disability communities by challenging institutionalized white privilege. Students engaged with the concepts of Otherness, strangeness, and belonging to challenge inequality, strengthen understandings of human complexity, and advance the narratives of equity and inclusion.