Title: Instructor
Department: Social Work
College/School: Thompson School of Social Work & Public Health
Showcase Course: SW 659 Human Behavior & the Social Environment I (SW 659 HBSE I); SW 660 Human Behavior & the Social Environment II (SW 660 HBSE II)
Email: dnisthal@hawaii.edu
“Learning becomes a collective journey of healing, transformation, and liberation.”
Table of Contents
Teaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy is rooted in ixtlamatilistli, a Nahuatl concept meaning “to give wisdom to the face.” Teaching is not a one-way, top-down transfer of knowledge, but a reciprocal exchange of teotl—sacred energy. Inspired by my grandmother, Faustina Escobar, I approach education as a holistic process engaging body, mind, heart, and spirit. In the classroom, I aim to create ceremonial learning spaces where students connect their personal histories to the legacies of colonialism, center Indigenous knowledge, and imagine new possibilities for justice. Learning becomes a collective journey of healing, transformation, and liberation.
Ixtlamatilistli: Teaching as ceremony & learning as transformation
Teaching Practice
My teaching practice is grounded in Ixtlamatilistli, a Nahuatl concept meaning “to give wisdom to the face.” In Mesoamerican traditions, teaching and learning are not transactions but reciprocal exchanges of teotl—sacred energy—through which both teacher and student are transformed. Guided by this understanding, I approach the classroom as a ceremonial space where stories, lineages, and critical inquiry converge in service of healing and collective liberation. While I use multiple strategies, the guiding practice is framing the classroom as ceremony—integrating reflective writing, dialogue, and experiential learning into a coherent approach that ensures students cultivate self-awareness and transformation. This approach can be adapted across fields and disciplines by centering critical reflection, reciprocal learning, and developing a lens that interrogates how race, gender, sexuality, class, and other social forces shape knowledge production. What follows expands on my teaching practice, the ways the courses are scaffolded to support student development, and the applicability of this approach beyond social work.
Each class begins by forming a circle, symbolizing that learning is cyclical and communal. We open by engaging in a grounding activity such as taking deep, intentional breaths to transition from the outside world into our shared learning space. Early in the semester, we participated in a practice known as “Guts on the Table,” taught by the late Kumu Puanani Burgess and shared with me by Dr. Paula Morelli. In this practice, each person shares the story of their name, community, and gifts. I model vulnerability by sharing my own story first, inviting others to do the same. This ceremony establishes our learning community as one grounded in trust, empathy, accountability, and mutual respect—values essential to professional social work practice and foundational to the scaffolding that follows.
Building from this practice, both courses are intentionally scaffolded to support increasing levels of reflection, analysis, and applied practice. The first phase centers self-awareness through critical inquiry, inviting students to examine how their identities are shaped within a world marked by colonialism and imperialism. As we explore the paradigms that inform human behavior, students engage in reflective journaling and dialogue to understand how their histories inform their interpretations of human behavior. This opening phase culminates in a narrative essay that invites students to reflect on the paradigms that have shaped their lives and how contemporary paradigms inform their emerging personal and professional identities. This work lays the foundation for deeper engagement with theory and practice.
In the second phase, students extend these reflections into applied analysis. In SW 659 HBSE I, students identify a social problem and critically examine it by naming the dominant paradigm that shapes how the issue is framed, analyzing the narratives that paradigm produces, and offering a counter-paradigm that imagines more just and liberatory approaches. In SW 660 HBSE II, assignments such as the Media Analysis and the Interview with an Elder require students to apply lifespan development theories while integrating psychological, cultural, and ecological perspectives. These assignments connect theory with lived experience by inviting students to analyze how power and social structures shape human development and behavior. The media assignment allows students to practice analysis at a distance, while the elder interview brings the work into real relationships.
In the third phase, the Concept Map assignment deepens synthesis and creativity in both courses. Students develop visual or multimedia representations of key concepts from our central texts, class discussions, supplemental readings, and themes emerging from the group. This creative work allows students to draw meaningful connections between their lived experiences, the course materials, and the writing assignments. The project cultivates higher-order thinking, reinforces the integration of theory and practice, and encourages students to articulate, in their own words and mediums, how they understand the relationships between course themes, their lives, and ongoing social work practice.
Finally, students complete a Self-Evaluation in which they assess their growth, learning, and transformation across the semester. This reflective assignment invites students to link their experiences to professional competencies and lifelong learning goals, offering space to articulate how they have developed, and ways they hope to continue growing. It serves as both a closure and an opening, encouraging students to carry forward the insights cultivated throughout the course.
Together, these assignments guide students through a developmental arc that can be adapted across fields and disciplines—from self-awareness, to critical analysis, to applied, relational practice. The ceremonial structure of the course underscores the importance of relationship as a central element of any learning process. The principles of ceremony—storytelling, reciprocity, and trust-building—complement scaffolded academic work by supporting deep engagement and meaning-making. Approaching learning through critical inquiry into one’s own life, followed by analysis of broader systems and applied relational practice, supports a reciprocal learning process that can strengthen teaching and learning in a wide range of academic and professional contexts.
Impact
Across both courses, students apply skills in culturally responsive ways, including critical self-reflection using Indigenous and decolonial frameworks; analyzing how identities and perspectives are shaped by dominant and counter paradigms; mapping connections between paradigms and contemporary social issues; and examining how counter paradigms inform community-based interventions. Students engage in reflective journaling, experiential in-class exercises, and applied assignments linking personal and ancestral histories to human behavior. Learning is assessed through single-point rubrics, concept mapping presentations, in-class discussions, narrative and analytic essays, observation, and pre- and post-class check-ins.
100% of students demonstrated strong analytical skills in examining dominant and counter paradigms through assignments such as the Concept Map and the Final Paper. In the Concept Map, students visually represented connections between course themes and lived experiences; in the Final Paper, they analyzed social issues through dominant paradigms while proposing responses grounded in counter paradigms. Student work consistently met rubric criteria for clarity, depth of critical analysis, and synthesis of perspectives. One student wrote, “David brought in heart, history, and a critical lens to achieve deep trust and a truly decolonized learning space…I feel better prepared to meet the needs of future clients and have more tools for self-care and self-healing.” Students frequently report applying these insights in field placements and community-based settings.
In course evaluation surveys, 100% of students strongly agreed that the course developed professional skills, contributed meaningfully to their education, enhanced their ability to address real-world problems, and challenged them intellectually. One student described the classroom as a “safe, transformative space.”