Core Educators
Petra Salazar
MFA in Poetry, MEd in Secondary Education
Petra Salazar is an educator and artist from Northern New Mexico, Indohispano holy ground for environmental activism, philosophy, and art. Petra is interested in embodied and land-based creative practices and the sacred dynamic between artist, art, and audience.
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Petra was a finalist and honorable mention in the 2022 Button Chapbook Contest. Her work has been featured in Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Sonora Review, The Southampton Review, Latin American Literature Today, and elsewhere.
Petra holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry from UNC-G, where she graduated as a Fred Chappell Fellow. She also holds a Master of Education degree & a Graduate Certificate in Nonprofit Management from George Washington University. Petra has had additional formative educational experiences as an Army National Guard diesel mechanic, military conscientious objector to the Iraq War, labor activist, community organizer, higher ed administrator, certified master gardener, herbalism apprentice, and mindfulness and Tai chi practitioner.
Pedagogy Statement
I approach education and poetry as healing, liberatory practices that transcend rigid learning and literary spaces. My pedagogy—what I call Coyote Pedagogy—is rooted in adaptability, relational knowledge, and the trickster ethos of border-crossing. I prioritize process over product, dialogue over isolation, and curiosity over prescriptive judgment. Influenced by the pedagogical frameworks of Paulo Freire, bell hooks, and Maria Montessori, as well as mindfulness and metacognition—what I call “breaking the fourth wall in educational settings”—I emphasize fostering “live questions,” cultivating personal connections to material, and co-creating learning environments that embrace uncertainty and transformation. Coyote Pedagogy is a way of thinking and teaching that resists rigid authority and embraces the in-between spaces where real learning happens.
I am committed to reimagining education through guerrilla publishing, the undercommons—the informal, often invisible networks of mutual aid sustaining social and intellectual life—and alternative learning communities. These movements challenge traditional schooling models that track learners, prioritize tradition over innovation and equity, abuse credentialing power, and commodify knowledge at the expense of wisdom, love, and land-based practices. Like the coyote, who survives through resourcefulness and movement, Coyote Pedagogy is about navigating these landscapes creatively, bridging past and future, structure and improvisation, resistance and survival.
As an educator, I see my role as a facilitator rather than an authority. I prepare the learning environment, curate texts and media, affirm and encourage curiosity, ask meaningful questions, and help students recognize patterns, synthesize ideas, and forge connections across disciplines and lived experiences. Coyote Pedagogy resists the rigidity of institutional gatekeeping and instead cultivates a practice of wandering, questioning, and shapeshifting in pursuit of deeper understanding, critical thinking, and self-determined learning. It is a pedagogy of movement, trickster wisdom, and collective survival.
Contributing Educators
Francisco Gallegos (he/him)
PhD in Philosophy
Born in Albuquerque, NM, Francisco Gallegos specializes in phenomenology, philosophy of emotions, and Latin American philosophy. After completing his PhD at Georgetown University, he worked for a year as a philosophical consultant in Silicon Valley. He is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University.
