Pedagogy

Empathy, Equity, and Rigor

As faculty members, we consistently work to refine our teaching practices in order to meet students where they are and provide a strong basis for their success in our classrooms. Here at West, three closely interrelated pillars sustain my pedagogical strategies:

Showing empathy toward students and where they find themselves in their lives, careers, and educational journeys is vital to being a West instructor. In the course of my sixteen years of teaching, I have worked with student populations at private institutions that come from positions of enormous privilege. This is not the West student body. In addition to marginalized backgrounds, my students this semester are also engaged with carceral and shelter systems. Therefore, while I seek to challenge students in my courses, I also recognize that it is important to show a degree of empathy about where they might find themselves.
Being persistently equity-minded about recognizing and resisting structural barriers to student success is key to West's educational mission. Our student body is wonderfully diverse, leading to vibrant classes and campus activities at West. However, students also grapple with extraordinary difficulties and hardships. Systemic deficiencies persist and require strategies that will uphold equity.
Ensuring meaningful standards of academic rigor in our curriculum is also necessary. Recognizing that students face serious struggles, including those with which we are ill-equipped to help, does not mean that instructors should abandon high standards of instruction. If we patiently hold students accountable to rigorous learning principles, they will be challenged to grow and assert a sense of agency.

In order to meaningfully carry out these pedagogical approaches in the last year, I have taken concrete steps to improve the educational experiences I offer students in my classrooms, both in-person and online. Below I outline these steps.

Banners and text boxes added to my Canvas pages.

HTML Coding in Canvas

Professor Stella Setka's elegantly designed course shells inspired me to learn more about HTML coding in Canvas. Through a mixture of YouTube and Instructure tutorials, modification of her publicly available coding, and trial-and-error tinkering with HTML, I spent part of this past summer revising the landing pages of my course shells. The goal was to produce improved Canvas pages that are more vivid, aesthetically dynamic, and, I hope, more appealing to students. Suggestions for refining these pages are certainly welcome.

Sankey diagram illustrating theories' relationships to course concepts.

Visualization Techniques

Many students are visual learners. In order to meet them where they are, I experiment with software that can visualize data and concepts.

As one small example, I created a version of a Sankey diagram to help students make sense of the various concepts tied to the three major sociological paradigms we discuss in my Introduction to Sociology classes.

In addition to showing them how concepts are linked to the theories, the diagram illustrates expectations. For example, in order to do well on the final exam, they must understand how a symbolic interactionist approach would characterize culture and status.

Midterm assignment focused on a close reading of Alexis de Tocqueville.

Course Enhancement

In an effort to enhance my course designs, I participated in the Community College Course Redesign Institute in American Political and Social Thought, held at Hostos Community College in New York this past April. Organized by a Mellon-funded organization called The Great Questions Foundation (TGQF), the conference included two days spent with community college faculty from around the country working on discussion-based pedagogical strategies for the social sciences.

As a kind of pilot project inspired by the Institute experience, I enhanced my fall 2025 Introduction to Sociology courses with a mid-term assignment that asked students to carry out a close reading of excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. (I include a screenshot on this page, with a link to the full-text of the assignment here.) The assignment aligns with two course modules:

Research Methods: Students are asked to think about and question Tocqueville's methodology and subjectivity, thereby considering basic processes in how sociological knowledge is produced.
Government and Politics: Students are asked to think about our current political moment from a sociological point of view informed by Tocqueville's own analysis.

So far, students have risen to the challenge of these close reading assignments and submitted strong analyses of Tocqueville's material. Their performance has encouraged me to develop and assign more close reading assignments in these courses.

I might also add here that when TGQF expressed interest in hosting their next institute on an LACCD campus, I did my best to bring the event to West. Unfortunately, TGQF and our Facilities department were unable to come to terms in their negotiations. I then referred TGQF to the Social Sciences Department at East Los Angeles College, where the institute will now be held in November. At the invitation of TGQF, I will be serving as an institute facilitator.

Teaching Transformative Texts

TGQF is also funding a project administered by four Language Arts faculty at West called Humanities Across the Curriculum. In this initiative, West faculty are encouraged to use transformative texts in discussion-based pedagogical strategies and work with other faculty across disciplines on learning best practices. As one of the faculty members selected to participate, I am really enjoying the opportunity to experiment with how texts can enliven students' understanding of the sociological imagination.

In a recent assignment for this initiative, I proposed using the opening soliloquy of Shakespeare's Richard III to engage the "great question" of "Who am I?" As I often remind my sociology students, every single person alive at this moment requires an identity, a bundle of stories about why they should bother getting up in the morning. Some people answer this question of “Who am I?” in a rather straightforward manner: I am a mother, or I am a father. Others might answer it differently, according to their profession, gender expression, hobby, sport, ethnicity, or something comparable. How individuals respond to this central problem of identity formation is something in which sociologists are deeply interested.

In his opening soliloquy, Richard, as Duke of Gloucester, answers the great question of identity definitively. He willfully assumes the mantle of villainy and intends to harm his own family in order to achieve certain ends. His motive is also clear. He is denied the sexual pleasures that others enjoy, thereby rendering him, in essence, an incel armed with grievances and hatred. Still, it is resoundingly clear as a declaration. Can most people claim to so definitively link their identity to its roots?

Students' appraisals of Richard's soliloquy could reinforce why sociologists often speak of individuals’ ascribed versus achieved statuses: the ones we are assigned at birth, like our sex, as opposed to the statuses we acquire in our lives, like our gender expression. In this sense, Richard III offers us a fascinating depiction of identity and how one individual has chosen to achieve lofty and monstrous statuses—as a despotic and bloodthirsty King of England—given the unfortunate attributes he was ascribed at birth.

Climate Education

West is committed to carrying out teaching and research on the climate change crisis through its California Center for Climate Change Education, led by Dr. Jo Tavares. A few opportunities emerged in which my work closely aligned with this mission.

I received my second Academic Development Grant in the Climate Across the Curriculum initiative in order to add a climate-focused module to my Sociology of Gender (SOC 031) course. The module I developed asks students to examine the relationship between climate change and gender inequality using data and insights from research documents produced by UN Women, UN Climate Change, and the Global Gender and Climate Alliance.
At the invitation of Dr. Tavares, this past summer I dug into my urban policy background and gave a presentation to Climate Center interns titled “Reflections on Policy and Governance: Alignments and Coalitions.” I discussed lessons learned during my time working for the City of New Haven, Connecticut, as well as observations of policy debates in West Hollywood, where I currently live.
The Climate Center also awarded me a small grant stipend to attend the Blue Economy and Climate Action Pathways Summit, “Tides of Transformation: Advancing Workforce Solutions in the Blue Economy,” held at UCLA in March 2025.
I am in the midst of a research project focused on the work of Los Angeles-based artist Sam Shoemaker, titled "The Climate Resilience of Human-Fungi Networks." I submitted abstracts for presentation at Sciences Po in Paris (which was rejected) and at the British Sociological Association's 2026 conference at the University of Manchester (where notification of acceptance is pending).
I also encouraged Dr. Tavares to invite Mr. Shoemaker to speak at West. As a result, he was the keynote speaker at the Climate Center's Educators’ Symposium on Climate Change Education in October.

Additional Professional Development

Academic Senate President Pat Zuk appointed me to the Sociology Common Course Numbering (CCN) Faculty Workgroup of the Academic Senate for California Community Colleges, which convened for four days over the summer and again in October. We debated—at times vigorously—the topics, themes, and texts to include in certain sociology courses in the statewide CCN system. Working with colleagues from around the state on the nuts and bolts of developing course outlines was an extremely rewarding learning experience.

With a small grant award from the Professional Growth Committee, I attended the summer 2025 conference of Research Committee 28 of the International Sociological Association, held at UCLA and themed around social stratification and labor market restructuring. Listening to scholars presenting their work was invigorating, and there were plenty of insights and framings to bring back to my students, particularly about occupational categories, transmissions of capital, and the experience of widowhood.