Teaching Philosophy

My teaching philosophy is centered on the needs of my students and the creation of an interactive but organized learning environment. I often utilize new pedagogical tools to make the classroom more engaging, such as tabletop simulations to teach IR theory. As an instructor, I believe in providing detailed feedback, communicating my expectations clearly, and holding my students to high standards of academic performance and integrity. If you take my class, I will help you to communicate clearly, write strong arguments, and continuously improve your work.

My classes are organized on a similar pattern and emphasize interaction, creative thinking, and originality. Each week consists of mandatory and supplementary readings, a lecture, and seminar discussions. Students are expected to do the readings before class and come prepared to discuss the material. In my own experience, the best way to reinforce the concepts and ideas from a reading is talk about it, hear other's opinions, and even argue about it. Therefore, I give students many opportunities to express themselves and will do my best to create a comfortable atmosphere for classroom discussions. For students who are unable to participate as much as they would like in the classroom itself, I encourage them to share links, carry on discussions, and ask questions on digital discussion boards, which I will make available.

Although I do my best to create a fun and entertaining classroom, my classes are demanding because I expect students to make persuasive arguments, think critically, and exhibit originality in all of their assignments. This is difficult, I know. However, in an era of ubiquitous smart phones and Wikipedia, it is no longer a university graduate's job to simply find and reproduce a lot of details. Will all of humanity's knowledge literally at our fingertips, the important skill now is knowing how to synthesize vast amounts of data and give it meaning. I will help you develop the critical thinking and writing skills to make this possible.