Teaching portfolio

Relevant coursework

2021 Instruction and Assessment 697P: College Teaching Practice (capstone)

2021 Instruction and Assessment 597D: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in College Teaching

2020 Instruction and Assessment 697B: Using Technology for Teaching

2020 Instruction and Assessment 697A: Learner-Centered Teaching

2018 Geography 695C: Preparing Future Faculty

Certificates and trainings

2021 Certificate in College Teaching (in progress)

2021 Intentional Learning Relationships mini-course (Office of Instruction and Assessment, UA)

2019 Certificate in Online Course Design (Office of Instruction and Assessment, UA)

2019 Mini-course in facilitating online discussions (Office of Instruction and Assessment, UA)

2018 Leader in Classroom Diversity and Inclusion certificate (Office for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence, UA)

At an early age I sensed the liberatory potential of education – the potential for education to foster one’s critical consciousness and purpose in the world. My first critical awareness of education as a process emerged when I left a Montessori school for public school in the third grade. As a teaching philosophy, Montessori focuses on cultivating the natural inclinations and interests of learners to set the stage for lifelong learning. At Montessori, learning felt unbounded; I was supported in exploring my own purpose as a learner. In my public school, I was immediately met with a sense of misfit; I felt boxed into a standardized model of learning that did not respond to who I was as a learner or a person. This tension defined my education until I arrived in the Ohio University Honors Tutorial College, where I was able to craft my own personalized undergraduate curriculum composed of one-on-one dialogues with professors. It felt like a return to the space of Montessori, a space in which I felt recognized as a person and an intellectual, a space that deeply challenged me yet also honored my own vision for my education.

As an educator, I seek to recapture the spirit of these spaces that have enabled my own critical education and to enliven this spirit in students through learner-centered and inclusive pedagogy centered on student engagement. What does a classroom centered on engagement look like? For me, an engaged classroom is driven by active learning methods that promote reflection, dialogue, and problem solving in the classroom. Cultivating student engagement means granting students agency in directing their own learning process, through designing their own projects and inquiries, choosing how to demonstrate their skills in assessments, and connecting coursework to their own lives. Creating an engaging learning space also entails cultivating a classroom culture in which a diversity of students experience a sense of belonging that allows them to be present in the classroom.

Facilitating engaged learning through learner-centered teaching

Learner-centered teaching practices allow me to center interactive and collective engagement with course material, rather than relying on traditional professor-centered content delivery. When designing lesson plans, I build in space for active engagement in the form of discussion, brainstorming, analysis, problem-solving, and reflection. This entails designing course sessions as multiple mini-lessons (e.g., 15-20 minute segments) to break up class time and engage students in the course material. For example, in a lesson on environmental racism in my Environmental Studies class, students use a mapping tool from the Environmental Protection Agency to explore how social and environmental indicators overlay to produce environmental injustice in a given place. I open this lesson with this exploratory mapping activity to prompt students to describe patterns they discern between social and environmental indicators on the maps. Here, the mapping exercise is a moment of discovery that facilitates a discussion of what causes these patterns and allows them to persist. As this example demonstrates, I often use internet technologies to build class discussion around student reflections, inputs, and moments of discovery, including Google Jamboard, Mentimeter, interactive slides, and mapping tools (see my teaching portfolio for lesson plans and examples of these activities). These tools allow students see their ideas and observations directly feeding into class discussion while allowing less outspoken students to contribute.

At its heart, learner-centered teaching engages students by acknowledging and validating their lived experiences. I engage storytelling and reflection assignments to accomplish this. For example, I may begin a unit with individual written or spoken reflections on what students already know about a topic (e.g., food access). Through sharing and dialogue, we individually and collectively reflect on what we have come to know about the topic, the differences that shape our knowledge, and what experiences we can bring to our collective learning. At the end of the unit, students are again presented with these same reflection questions. While they reflect on course content from a new vantage point, they are also asked to meta-reflect on how classroom engagement has shifted their perspectives on course content as well as bigger questions of how their positionality shapes them as knowers. By inviting students to reflect on their own experiences, positionalities, and learning processes, I aim to increase their sense of involvement and ownership in their learning process while sharpening their self-awareness.

Learner-centered teaching also means creating a classroom space in which students can exercise agency and choice. Through the principles of universal design, I incorporate a diversity of learning preferences and options from the start so that students feel like they can make meaningful choices about their learning. To operationalize universal design, I design multi-model course assessments (i.e., written, oral, and other forms of communication) so that students can choose how to engage course content and demonstrate their knowledge. Students are guided to master communication skills of various genres through detailed rubrics that highlight the key skills and aims associated with the assessment of their choice. I extend this multi-modality to course materials, using multiple forms of media (e.g., videos, podcasts, comics) to convey course content to engage as many students as possible.

Teaching the whole person through inclusive and responsive teaching

A central premise of my teaching approach is that students are more willing and capable of engaging academically when they feel recognized and engaged as whole persons and when their unique experiences and contributions are recognized. For me, cultivating an engaged classroom thus requires a thoughtful and inclusive approach to course design and classroom culture that can enable this space of recognition and presence. Creating a classroom space where diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is respected and valued is a first step in creating this kind of classroom culture. As a starting point, I approach the syllabus as a place to signal my commitments to DEI by including microaggression and pronoun policies that set the tone for respectful classroom engagement and by including a basic needs statement that recognizes the complexity of students’ lives and their needs for diverse forms of support. My goal here is to signal concern for students’ wellbeing, show respect for their personhood, and set the tone for engagement, all of which I hope allows students to participate in their learning more fully.

Increasing inclusion and equity in the classroom also means addressing barriers that differentially impact student success. One way I work to increase equity, access, and inclusion in my classroom is by purposefully demystifying academic skills and tasks. For example, I build elementary instruction in effective college writing into my assignments through mini-lessons on genre, argumentation, and organization; detailed instructions and rubrics; and timely and detailed feedback on students’ writing. Students have conveyed that these are skills they have never been taught, yet they are foundational for success in higher education and their careers. In a similar vein, I design research projects as scaffolded sets of assignments that unfold over the course of the semester. Students work through component parts focused on particular skills (e.g., identifying sources, constructing an outline, writing a bibliography, etc.) and I provide feedback on each step of the process. This iterative approach allows students to hone research skills and enables me to support and direct students as their projects unfold. These two practices help demystify college research and writing skills and make success more attainable for all students.

Inclusive teaching also requires addressing the ways that inequalities in our broader society become reflected and reproduced within the classroom. For me, our syllabi either reproduce or challenge these uneven social relations. Therefore, I design my course syllabi in a way that reflects a diversity of social and cultural experiences. For example, my environmental studies class opens with a discussion of the global history of environmentalism. At the opening of the course, students learn about environmentalisms of the Global South and more familiar U.S.-centered narratives and are asked to reflect on how different political and cultural histories shape the meaning of environmentalism around the world. Similarly, when I teach a course on food systems, I will begin from the founding of the U.S. food and agricultural system on Indigenous dispossession and slavery, rather than more common starting points such as post-WWII industrialization. This reference point is foundational for understanding the violence and inequality that is ubiquitous in contemporary food systems. These examples illustrate how I seek to be mindful about course framings to account for underrepresented voices and stories so that a diversity of students can connect to course material and develop a critical awareness through it.

Mentoring

My approach to mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students is aligned with the aforementioned principles that shape my teaching. I have mentored undergraduates in research settings and in student-driven independent study. In both cases, I have co-created the agenda with the students while providing opportunities for key skill development. As a mentor for graduate students, I will provide structured opportunities for key skill development while demystifying and modeling strategies for success. For example, early on in their training, I will instruct graduate students on key academic skills, including using research databases, reviewing books, conducting and writing up literature reviews, and other aspects of the “hidden curriculum.” Through hands-on mentorship, I aim to equip students with the necessary skills and professional development opportunities for them to be able to pursue their independent research with confidence and competence. As my research becomes increasingly collaborative, I am excited to engage students on my projects to the extent that they are interested and see collaboration as another avenue for modeling academic skills for students.

In conclusion, my teaching and mentorship are driven by my convictions about the value of a responsive education and guided by the principles and practices of learner-centered and inclusive teaching. I endeavor to foster the potentials of a learner-centered undergraduate education responsive graduate student training where students are granted the agency and individualized support to develop their academic skills and their sense of purpose as learners.

Instructorships

Summer 2020

Instructor. Environmental Studies 260: Ideas and Institutions (online). University of Arizona.

Spring 2020

Instructor and Designer. Environmental Studies 260: Ideas and Institutions (online). University of Arizona.

Summer 2018

Instructor and Designer. Designed and directed independent study with undergraduate student on gender, climate change, and Indian agriculture. Pennsylvania State University (through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection Program).

Spring 2018

Co-Instructor and Designer. Co-designed and co-taught seminar on critical development studies for four advanced undergraduate students. Pennsylvania State University (through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection Program).

Assistantships

Spring 2017

Graduate assistant. Geography 002: Apocalyptic Geographies. Duties: Curriculum development, course preparation. Pennsylvania State University.

Fall 2016

Teaching Assistant. Geography 30 Online: Human-Environment Geography and Sustainability. Duties: Grading. Pennsylvania State University.

Student mentoring

Spring 2018

Mentor. Mentored two undergraduate research assistants in conjunction with my dissertation research. Pennsylvania State University (through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection Program).

Fall 2017

Mentor. Mentored one undergraduate research assistant in conjunction with my dissertation research. Pennsylvania State University (through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Connection Program).