Our Teaching Spotlight allows The Collaborative to recognize Trinity faculty and teaching staff who are demonstrating thoughtful and innovative teaching practices. We hope these features also serve to remind us of our shared commitment to meaningful and intentional pedagogy.

1. How would you finish the following sentence: being a professor at Trinity means…

… guiding young adults and giving them the tools to trust themselves as they chart their own path into the world. We faculty members have the privilege of making deep connections with our students just as they are going through a tremendous transition: leaving the safety of the homes they were raised in (literally and metaphorically) and leaping into the wide open world. Life is full of transitions from dependence to independence, but college is among the most significant. Through our teaching, Trinity affords professors an opportunity to mentor students through this transition, giving them the tools to choose their own paths. In my own specific case, my research has also allowed me to look closely at this transition and share what I’ve learned with other scholars.

2. Your research focuses on political etiquette, specifically ethical dilemmas and conformity. At Trinity you participate in numerous democratic practices such as Faculty Senate, the Task Force on Civil Discourse and Academic Freedom, Academic Honor Council, and the Senate’s Academic Honor Council Reform Committee. How has your participation in these committees allowed you to see the morals/norms of Trinity and what does it mean to have opportunities like this as a faculty member? 

Because I study social norms, I see them everywhere! I’ll focus on just one example.

Working with the Honor Council during the emergence of generative AI has been particularly fascinating, revealing the way that a community depends on functional social norms, and the way that dysfunctional norms can fail us. Trinity is an Honor Code school, which means that our institutional approach to academic integrity begins with trust that all or nearly all members of our community—especially students—have accepted commitment to academic integrity. “Acceptance” in this context means that students comply with the Honor Code because they believe they should, and not because they are worried about getting caught violating it. That level of acceptance is hard to sustain in general, but becomes much more difficult when you introduce a new technology that dramatically lowers the cost of cheating and makes it dramatically harder to detect. Because the technology is new, there are no established social norms about it. Faculty disagree about when and how students should be allowed to use AI. A student who might feel morally repulsed by the idea of paying a classmate to write her paper might not feel that way about asking ChatGPT to write it. Things are further complicated by the doubts that some students feel about whether the skills we teach will still be relevant in a job market shaped by AI. All of these developments weaken the social norms that the Honor Code requires. We now need to face the challenge of reinscribing Honor Code values in this changing environment.

3. This year you are completing a Collaborative on Teaching and Learning Faculty Fellowship– what opportunities and inquiries has this fellowship allowed you to pursue?

I have been working on a project that investigates the way that faculty can grade writing effectively when their students do not defer to their expert judgment. The situation I have in mind is one in which students are not yet able to reliably detect the writerly virtues that are being assessed (e.g. the “clarity” of a thesis statement), but are also not willing to defer to their the professor’s say-so about the quality of their work. Of course, there is much that professors can and should do to encourage students to trust us, but even after we’ve done all that, we might have some students who don’t trust our judgment. I have certainly had students who were very skeptical that the characteristics I saw in their writing were real, and I always find this to be a fascinating pedagogical problem. The approach I’m pursuing in this project looks for ways to make grades “auditable” by the student: setting up assignments so that students are assessed using only evaluative criteria whose satisfaction they can independently verify. In an extreme case, that might mean grading them based on whether they met an essay’s word count; in a less extreme case, it might mean building a rubric out of simpler characteristics that students can reliably detect as a way of approximating the more complex characteristics they can’t discern yet.

I’ve been experimenting with different strategies for years, but the Collaborative Fellowship has enabled me to really focus on these questions.

4. Trinity University offers faculty a plethora of opportunities and a rich network of professionals to engage with; however, everyone comes to Trinity for something different. What brought you to Trinity and what keeps you here?

Initially, my overriding reason for coming to Trinity was the university’s commitment to students. I attended a liberal arts college for undergrad (Swarthmore!), and I benefitted enormously from the close relationships that small colleges foster, both between students and faculty and among classmates. The more I saw of the academic world after graduating, the more clearly I felt that I belonged in a community that materially supports that kind of intimate learning. I have found Trinity to be unique in the degree to which it cultivates these personal relationships. Trinity is also unique in the quality of its wraparound services it offers students, caring for them as whole people in residential life, spiritual life, accessibility, career services, and so on. As a faculty member, this larger community of care means that I can focus on challenging and supporting students academically in my classes without neglecting these other aspects of who they are (or worse, intrusively trying to take responsibility for their whole lives)!

Of course, once I got here, I started connecting with specific people at Trinity and in San Antonio, and those connections have now eclipsed everything I love about my work life and have become the most powerful argument for staying here!

5. Anything else you would like to share with the Trinity community? Any reflections on your time spent here teaching and learning with students?

I hope this doesn’t come across as cheesy: I am profoundly grateful that Trinity has entrusted me with so much creative freedom in my work! It is rare to find a job that lets you have this much space to play and experiment, and to read and talk about all the things you’re fascinated by. I can’t believe how fortunate I am to be here.