Teaching 

My teaching philosophy revolves around providing experiences that last a lifetime and impact students both in and out of the classroom. To accomplish this, I make sure that these experiences are hands-on, student-centered, and place-based. 

My classes are designed to cover traditional topics but augment the traditional framework of lectures and exams with hands-on lessons that prepare students for careers post-academia. For instance, Vertebrate Zoology allots a single 2-hour session to cover the vast topic of 'extant amphibians'; to get around this impossible time-constraint, my students meet me in the forest where I have set up treefrog tubes and they capture, identify, weigh, measure, and chytrid-swab ~20-25 treefrogs. With this single hands-on activity, they learn about disease ecology and the global chytrid pandemic, about wildlife tools and techniques using common materials, about proper ways to hold, measure, and swab frogs for population and community analyses, and about invasive species, in this case the Cuban treefrog. Through experiences like these, my students learn employable skills, both in the lab and the field, that reinforce broader scientific concepts. 

Students are living in increasingly digital worlds, and I believe it imperative that we meet them on their turf. A student-centered approach means understanding that students will be opening emails and attachments on phones rather than desktops, that sometimes an app can get them to the same place as a field guide, and that they often learn more effectively if you bring your topic into their world first. Early on, I had problems with students misidentifying birds in the field. The reason? Students complained the field guides were too cumbersome, and they were not used to flipping back and forth through pages like they are used to scrolling on their phones. Now, my students use the free Cornell Lab Merlin Bird app to ID species, snap photos, and even post them to online forums like iNaturalist. Working with the students and bringing the material into their comfort zone facilitates engagement. 

Place-based education provides students the opportunity to learn from the world around them, even after leaving the classroom. In Florida, for instance, the successful conservation of manatees, gopher tortoises, and wood storks provides tangible, place-based opportunities for students to learn from the past while observing these organisms in natural areas near campus. Students get to ponder broader topics like urbanization, conservation, wildlife management and corridors, population decline, genetic bottle-necking, and extinction all while becoming fluent in the natural history of Florida ecosystems. Place-based lessons not only provide ample access to hands-on experiences, they also give students a well-rounded understanding of and appreciation for their home. The best focal system to teach students a new concept is not necessarily the most eye-catching or the least complicated system, but rather the system that they already know.