I have experience being a TA/Climate Communications Fellow for UNIV102: Let's Talk About Climate Change, where I led a small group discussion related to weekly-varying, interdisciplinary, climate-change focused topics. One of my favorite memories from that course was having the students read the prologue of Omar El Akkad's fantastic novel American War, which led to an enriching conversation about the potential future impacts of climate change on the United States and the students' own lives. You can read one of the final essays from the class that discusses our thought-provoking exercises about how the students' world would look in 50 years here, or another one that reflects on the transformative impact of the class on a hopeful business leader.
I have also been a TA for PUBPOL304: Economics of the Public Sector and PUBPOL813: Quantitative Evaluation Methods, giving me undergraduate and graduate-level teaching experience with more lecture-based courses. I helped lead TA review sessions for both of these classes; you can see a midterm review I put together for PUBPOL813 here. As discussed below in my full teaching statement, for such classes I highly value hands-on experience working with problems or, when applicable, code and data. I have even designed my own course on complex social-ecological systems; have a look at the syllabus.
Finally, I was the instructor of record for PUBPOL303: Policy Choice as Value Conflict at Duke Kunshan University in the fall of 2025. This small, seminar-style course on the ethics which underlie policy choices gave me the opportunity to lead discussions and design activities with individual student interests and backgrounds in mind. In their overwhelmingly positive evaluations of the course, students described my teaching style as "intellectually engaging," and as encouraging of their desire to participate in class discussions and activities. This valuable teaching experience cemented my desire to continue on a career path that includes interactive educational opportunities alongside research.
As an instructor in the environmental social sciences, my main aim is to encourage students to embrace an understanding of social-ecological systems as complex and multifaceted. This is not just an abstract goal: my personal research into climate change adaptation is rooted in the science of complex systems and makes use of tools from these disciplines to simulate how communities respond to adverse climatic events. As a teacher, then, I work to motivate students to challenge assumptions of more basic, rationalist-paradigm models of social-ecological systems and learn about computational and non-traditional approaches to environmental policy problems, such as agent-based modeling. Parallel to this, students will take away from my coursework a healthy respect for perspectives outside the more traditional scope of the social sciences, including the views of marginalized and historically underrepresented scholars and communities.
In my coursework, I implement these lofty goals by having students directly engage with methods and research that comes from such non-traditional viewpoints. For example, in a class I designed on complex social-ecological systems, students will interact with the base code of an agent-based model of such a system. This will allow them to think about how such models could be applied to their work and give them technical experience that will be of benefit to them in future courses and research. By gaining hands-on experience with simulation techniques like agent-based models, students will also be introduced to behavioral theories and mechanisms that they may not have come across in typical economics and policy courses, for instance, non-rational or partially rational behavioral models. In this way, students taking my course will learn to critically think about what assumptions they make concerning human behavior and how such assumptions may contribute to policymaking decisions which are sub-optimal or further existing inequities. For this reason, assessment in the course will mainly gauge pupils’ abilities to critically consider the costs and benefits of various types of policy models and theorize about how model assumptions may impact various subpopulations at threat from environmental risks. Concretely, this would take the form of final research projects and essays which pose a policy problem, address the problem using a computational or statistical approach, and adequately explain how the approach takes into account social and environmental concerns. I was able to implement some of these active learning practices in a completely different course setting in a seminar on the ethics of public policy that I taught at Duke Kunshan University (DKU), where students had to both give oral presentations on various policy problems and participate in group activities related to policy-making roleplay and debate.
These aims, of course, would be useless without encouraging a diverse and comfortable classroom environment in tandem. I know from my experience as a teaching assistant for a course focused on interdisciplinary approaches to climate change that many environmental-related issues are thorny, uncomfortable, and even anxiety-inducing topics for students. For this reason, another one of my goals as an instructor is to create a classroom environment in which participation is contingent on student capacity to approach a particular question. An integral part of my teaching philosophy is that while students should occasionally feel uncomfortable approaching a topic, it should never threaten their ability to maintain their mental and physical health. Thus, if a student does not feel able to complete a specific assignment because the topic is too personally upsetting for them (for example, if we were discussing tropical storm risks to property and they had lost their home in a hurricane), it should be possible for them to access assessment in an alternate way. It is my belief that this not only safeguards the health of students, but encourages more diverse viewpoints in the classroom by allowing pupils to express themselves in the way they most feel safe doing. Again, I was able to put these ideas into practice at DKU, where students overwhelmingly described my classroom atmosphere as “comfortable” and encouraging of healthy learning.
My teaching philosophy and methods will, of course, continue to develop as I grow as an instructor. My experience grading and leading a discussion group for the above-mentioned class taught me several important lessons, especially regarding how to get students engaged with a topic into which they may be hesitant to wade. For instance, when teaching my course at DKU, I had students deliberate as a class on immigration and environmental policy problems, giving them active experience with team decision-making. I have also learned how to be creative with starting conversations, for example by having students read works of literature that deal with environmental issues and talk with their peers about what issues the work raised for them. This was also helpful in solidifying another aspect of my teaching philosophy: connecting what students learn and discuss to broader cultural conversations and the world of art, which for many students may be more directly engaging than scientific literature. My development as an instructor continued with teaching more quantitative undergraduate and graduate-level courses. I held frequent office hours for these classes and helped grade many types of assignments, directly engaging with students on a regular basis and helping them to learn how economic principles are applied to public policy issues.
Thus, although I am early on in my journey as an instructor of college students, I have ambitious but well-grounded goals regarding where I would like to be in a few years. I hope to encourage a next generation of professionals and scholars to think outside the box when it comes to questions of climate change adaptation and consider where computational methods can help design policies that are equitable and help mitigate the worst impacts of climate change. Students will thus gain hands-on experience with data and models to learn about a variety of methods that are used in the environmental social sciences. Most importantly, I hope to be a mentor to my students in these areas, helping them to learn and develop towards whatever career path they choose in an environment where they can have novel experiences while maintaining control of their personal ambitions and well-being.