Victoria Reyes’ teaching interests include culture, global/transnational sociology, economic sociology, urbanism, historical/comparative sociology, law and society, methods, theory, and introduction to sociology, as well as graduate and undergraduate courses on substantive topics such as borders and borderlands, transnational sex, and race and empire.
She has taught classes as small as 6 students and as large as 561 students, and received UCR Department of Sociology’s 2019 Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Graduate Students Award. Her approach to teaching is student-centered and based on ideas such as:
- Students and scholars should be methodologically literate in both qualitative and quantitative methods and how claims should always match their data
- Transparency in expectations
- Giving students the tools they need to succeed
- Mutual respect
- The classroom as an environment where we are all learners: faculty, teaching assistants/graduate students, and undergraduate students all learn from one another
- Application of classroom ideas and research to what students are observing and experiencing in everyday life
- Tackling community issues in the classroom
- A commitment to revealing the “hidden curriculum” of academia for underrepresented, first-generation, and other marginalized students
