I'm assuming you are teaching C to students who already know how to program in another language like Java (or back in my day, Pascal). I don't think C is a good language to use for teaching programming to complete novices.
I would teach pointers first. This is one of the important new ideas that that will be learning in C. They will already know the concept of arrays from other languages, so there's no urgency to teach this first. So when you do cover arrays in C, you can talk about how they are essentially syntactic sugar for pointer arithmetic, a concept they are now familiar with.
