TEACHING

 

An Overview

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In my classroom, politics and law serve as sites of inquiry that can be assessed not only for their capacity to secure normative and theory-driven ideals like equality and freedom, but also the ways in which the unquestioned veneration of such ideals may occlude the lived experiences of disparate treatment, transmit subordinating ideologies across generations, and frustrate realizations of justice.  

 

Students encounter canonical works of political theory and watershed cases alongside an array of historical documents and archival ephemera, sociological ethnographies, first person narratives and literature, philosophical tracts, data-driven analyses, and creative works.  They go "into the field" to explore the built legal and political environment, and engage with practitioners and scholars that I bring from the field to our classroom.  As students transfer the knowledge garnered from their course materials to the world, they build sustainable written and oral skills of application, analysis, and argument - and, by considering how to fill the observable "gap" between theory and practice, envision a more equitable legal and political future in their essays, projects, and theses.  

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By building a classroom that encourages curiosity, exploration, and the examination (and re-examination!) of long-held assumptions, I endeavor to cultivate a space within which students can feel both unsure about the steadfastness of their own beliefs and confident in their abilities to forge new pathways of knowledge - and to draw from their own experiences in doing so.  This approach has been shaped not only by my experiences teaching at Whitman College, Dickinson College, and the University of California-Berkeley, but also by participation in and leadership of pedagogical development workshops.

 

Pedagogical Development ​​​​

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As a graduate student, I completed UC-Berkeley's certificate of teaching and learning in higher education, which encouraged its participants to develop equitable and inclusive classroom policies and practices in service of educating a richly diverse student body.  This training later spurred me to join the Association for Political Theory's Standing Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, a committee for which I later led its Subcommittee on Inclusive Pedagogy.  Across three years, we developed workshops that sought to decolonize introductory political science syllabi, foster feminist and anti-racist teaching practices, incorporate trauma-informed pedagogies in the post-Covid classroom, and respond to bias in student feedback forms.  This final workshop, which featured a presentation by Dr. Betsy Barre of Wake Forest University, can also be found online here.  More information on my participation in pedagogical workshops can be found in my curriculum vitae.

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Most recently, I co-directed the Dialogues Across Differences project at Dickinson College.  This project, which was funded by a $300,000 grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, centered dialogue and disagreement as a means to 1) increase students' felt experiences of inclusion in higher education and 2) prepare them for a resilient and engaged life in their democratic communities.  The work of this grant was multifaceted; it encompassed faculty development workshops, an undergraduate and team-taught course, and a community engagement component, in which students moved throughout the College's campus and the broader community in order to put their dialogic skills into ethical practice.  This work subsequently informed my current leadership of a pedagogical inquiry grant at Whitman College on pedagogies of kindness, which funds an inter- and cross-disciplinary workshop on how faculty - in the wake of Covid-19 and in politically tumultuous times - can develop techniques that center care as a tool of learning and community.​​