Teaching Assistantships

Teaching Statement

My best teachers have been those who instilled my two primary academic values: humility and curiosity. They knew that to understand a concept is to understand it in context: they exemplified openness by not simply giving definitions, but by helping students understand how concepts relate to one another.

They made psychology more meaningful and approachable by situating psychologists within sociological and historical context. Students want to feel like they're standing on the shoulders of giants. I was fascinated by how the Cognitive Revolution in the 80s led to the existence of my major, cognitive science. They taught me that progress is nonlinear, and that paradigms are sociological: instead of Behaviorism being taught as a step backwards, I was captivated by how its values manifest in modern embodied cognition research. 

My teachers made themselves more approachable by not only prioritizing the experience of their students but also allowing their own enjoyment of the material to be contagious. Through teaching, we pop out from our research niche and look around. I am inspired and seek to emulate those who are able to use their expertise to distill and connect the vastness of field-specific knowledge while respecting the human mind for the mystery that it is. Inspired by my role models, I transmit "cognitive science in context" through assigning primary sources as reading and discussing their origins, as well as discussing how experimental results are situated within theoretical paradigms. To help students realize that learning and producing knowledge go hand-in-hand, I emphasize hands-on demonstrations and prioritize personal interaction with students.

Having internalized, as an undergraduate TA, the identity as a simultaneous a teacher and learner, I devoted much of my two postbaccalaureate years to teaching pursuits. I taught for two summer camps for school-aged children: The Brain Explorer Academy at UC Irvine and Duke Neurosciences Camp, which I also co-directed. Learning to explain neuroscience concepts differently to elementary, middle, and high school students was an exercise in pedagogy (in the most literal, etymological sense, as pedagogy bears the prefix for “children”). One key takeaway was that the skills required to explain concepts to young children are also key to teaching older students. Using catchy songs like Without Your Cerebellum to reinforce principles of motor system function, labeling regions on printable “brain hats,” doing target practice outside with “drunk goggles” to teach sensory adaptation, explaining visual illusions, and designing creative “exit ticket” reflection prompts prior to ending class are all examples of activities that are memorable for all ages.

Activity-oriented class design became important when I began my teaching assistantship as a graduate student at Duke during the first wave of COVID. My first assignments were to teach discussion sections of Introduction to Cognitive Psychology and Introduction to Cognitive Neuroscience. To keep my online students engaged, I based the day’s material on either an online demonstration or a real-world example of the topic in the media. We scrutinized claims of for-profit “brain training” companies, engaged with current measures of creative thinking ability, learned about the tricks used by “memory athletes,” and self-administered creativity assessments.

         After filling the “teacher” role for the undergraduate Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience discussion sections, I requested to TA for a renowned course in the department: Functional Anatomy of the Human Brain. This course is taught by Dr. Leonard White, and its online analog is the largest and one of the most popular courses on Coursera. As his TA, I assisted in broadcasting live human brain dissections and helped answer student questions by rotating through “teams” used in the flipped classroom format. Students completed problem sets and quizzes in groups that remained constant throughout the term, and remarked on how this format lent a rare sense of community during the COVID lockdowns. The team-based learning classroom model kept them engaged as they participated in more active learning during the class session and could watch lecture videos comfortably and on their own time. I taught a day of class on how memory, daydreaming, and imagination and learned how to write challenging quiz questions that moved beyond conceptual understanding and stimulated critical thinking. Overall, I learned a great deal about how much material students are eager and able to learn when inspired to do so, and am grateful to experience a professor whose encyclopedic knowledge of the human nervous system is counterbalanced by a willingness to learn from his students, a curiosity to try new teaching formats, and a sense of sacredness and wonder for the dissection specimen he was afforded.

Being intentional about my development as a teacher is a top priority. This has remained consistent for as long as I have worked in academic settings. As a bostbaccalaureate researcher at UC Irvine, these teaching activities were extra-curricular. Today, I am fortunate to take part in Duke’s Certificate in College Teaching program, which has helped me reflect upon my class design and rhetoric while I work with undergraduates. It will also open the door for further training in the Preparing Future Faculty program.  To take full advantage of the abundant resources at Duke for practicing and improving my teaching, I hope to fund a sixth year of graduate school through the Duke Bass Instructional Fellowship to design and teach a course on my area of expertise, cognitive science.