Teaching Statement

When I think back to the courses I most enjoyed as an undergraduate, they were taught by professors who were passionate about the material, they were able to relate said material to daily life in an accessible way, and they taught in a way that was rigorous and engaging at the same time. This approach has informed my own teaching philosophy going forward as I too try to emulate these practices through the implementation of three guiding statements in my own course design:

1. Required readings/materials should go beyond the textbook and engage scholarly, popular, and journalistic sources.
2. Assignments should encourage students to explicitly use course concepts and begin in the classroom.
3. In-class engagement and discussion are more valuable than checking boxes and circling answers on an exam.

When I design a course, I develop it with the intent that course material should draw from broad sources. While textbook material is obviously valuable and important, in my courses, the textbook acts more so as a guide and structuring agent for my own lectures, rather than something I require students to read each week. Textbooks are dry, and often not particularly engaging, which discourages students from reading the material. I thus draw broadly from scholarly articles and chapters, popular writing, and journalistic work to supplement lectures, it gives students material to read that can then be examined through course materials in a way that encourages us to tie these works back to daily life.

This goes hand-in-hand with my assignment design as well. While my courses still rely on traditional practices (a midterm and final exam, quizzes, essays, etc.) I design the core of my course assignments around active engagement with the world around us. My courses implement a series of “applied” assignments that encourage students to think about the concepts we discuss as they relate to their daily lives, be it a “symbol scavenger hunt” where students seek out significant symbols in their daily lives and discuss their meanings or a “social control tally” which encourages students to tally every moment they experience a form of social control (security camera, officer, etc.) and write a brief reflective essay on it. These assignments tie into the course content being discussed that week and allow students to think and meditate on them actively, rather than well after the fact. This also carries a secondary benefit of combatting potential AI usage in the classroom; by tying these activities directly into daily life, it is often a greater headache for students to use AI for assignment completion instead of simply doing it themselves.

Finally, the focus on starting and ending assignments in the classroom facilitates what I believe is most important for a successful, engaging class: in-class discussion and participation. It is difficult to generate in-class discussions when students are unfamiliar with the material, by intertwining in-class discussion with the beginnings and ends of student assignments, they are more invested in the material and I find, are more often interested in ensuring that they are thoroughly considering it rather than going through the motions.

I hope to take these approaches further as I teach future courses. In particular, I have the outlines for a course on race and ethnicity, based in literature that takes a historical and constructionist account of race into consideration. I have also assisted with methods and theory courses and am comfortable teaching in these environments as well, as I personally believe that strength in methods and theory contributes heavily to developing a holistic scholarly imagination.

*Example teaching materials available upon request