TEACHING
Pedagogy
An Overview
In my classroom, students explore how political theory and the law can illuminate the democratic potential of ideals like justice, equality, and freedom, even as they assess how the unquestioned veneration of those ideals may occlude lived experiences of disparate treatment, transmit subordinating ideologies across generations, and frustrate ordinary realizations of justice.
In doing so, students often encounter canonical, contemporary, and comparative works of political theory and watershed legal cases alongside a carefully chosen set of historical documents, archival material, first person narratives, and literature. They go "into the field" to explore their built political and legal environment, and they engage with practitioners and scholars that I bring from the field to our classroom. As students bring their course materials to bear on the larger world, they build sustainable written and oral skills of analysis, argument, and application - and, by considering how to fill the "gap" between theory and practice, envision a more equitable future in their essays, projects, and theses.
By building an agile classroom that encourages curiosity, exploration, and the recursive 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
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 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.
For three years, 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 leadership of a pedagogical inquiry grant at Whitman College on pedagogies of kindness, which funds an inter- and cross-disciplinary workshop on how faculty can develop techniques that center care as a tool of learning and community.
Courses
Teaching Experience
My courses span the curriculum. Across my time at Whitman, Dickinson, and UC-Berkeley, I have taught courses that range from first-year seminars to introductory courses in theory and in law to advanced interdisciplinary and disciplinary seminar courses to inside-out-style courses in local penitentiaries. In order for students to build sustainable skills of textual interpretation, argument-driven analysis, and real-world applications, I developed a series of pedagogical techniques designed to encourage students to dwell with their materials, to engage in recursive thinking, and to assess critically their observations of and engagements with their communities of meaning. As examples, I have developed:
Biblio-Bingo
Designed for introductory courses, the biblio-bingo exercise assists students in generating defensible arguments from the text, rather than beginning with an opinion and then selectively using the text to illustrate the correctness of that opinion. This exercise, which I use in courses like "What is Justice?" and "What is Democracy?", asks students to 1) play a game of bingo, within which their winning numbers correspond to key passages of text; 2) collaborate with their peers to paraphrase, analyze, and extend those key passages; 3) develop a thesis from the passages they have before them; 4) consider whether to "swap" a passage for another passage that might better cohere with their draft thesis; and 5) articulate a "so what" that emerges from their thesis, their text-based analyses, and their interpretation of the guiding prompt. Student then submit their biblio-bingos for feedback, and the exercise is graded credit-no credit. The materials for the biblio-bingo can be accessed here: bingo cards (with guiding question) and assignment guidelines (with text bank).
The Commonplace Book
Inspired by my colleagues in philosophy, and by the anti-AI pedagogical collective, I use the commonplace book in my advanced seminar courses. The commonplace book, as originally understood by John Locke, is an exercise in creating an "encyclopedia of the mind" when encountering new texts, new ideas, or new paths of inquiry. At the start of the semester, students receive a bound journal, a set of writing utensils, and sticky notes, and then - as the semester progresses - they are tasked with engaging with their readings in their commonplace books. They are asked to copy and critically assess passages that feel crucial or confusing, create thematic indexes and glossaries of terms of art, revisit their past assessments in light of new knowledge, and more. For classes like my Capital Punishment course, which possesses a community-engaged component, students are also tasked with using their commonplace books to make durable connections between the things they learn in class and what they experience in the world. At the end of the course, the commonplace book serves as the foundation for the students' final papers. The instructions for "The Commonplace Book for Our Common Place in Walla Walla," as used in my Capital Punishment seminar, can be accessed here. The development of this assignment, in particular, was funded by Whitman College's Mellon Humanities for All Time Grant, which fosters the incorporation of place-based pedagogy into courses focused on matters of social justice.
Courses Taught
The courses listed below encompass my time at Whitman College, Dickinson College, and the University of California-Berkeley. Syllabi for these courses can be found below, as can evidence of teaching effectiveness.
Whitman College
Introductory Level Courses
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Democracies, Ideologies, and Elections (Fall 2024)
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What is Justice? (Fall 2025, Fall 2026)
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What is Democracy? (Spring 2026, Spring 2027)
Intermediate Level Courses
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Ordinary Law (Spring 2025, Spring 2026, Fall 2026)
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Theories of Public Order (Fall 2024)
Advanced Seminars
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Religious Freedom (Fall 2024, Fall 2025)
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Race, Citizenship, and Belonging (Spring 2025)
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Capital Punishment (Fall 2025, Fall 2026)
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Crisis and Repair (Spring 2027)
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Sites of Justice: Exploring "The Prison" (Spring 2026)
Dickinson College
Introductory Level Courses
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First Year Seminar: Power & Protest (Fall 2022)
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Introduction to Political Philosophy (Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2021, Spring 2021, Summer 2021)
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Foundations of Law and Policy (Fall 2019)
Intermediate Level Courses
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The Judiciary (Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Spring 2019, Spring 2020)
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Philosophy of Law (Fall 2018)
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Gender & Justice (Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Spring 2023, Spring 2024)
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Law & American Society (Spring 2022)
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Capital Punishment (Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023)
Advanced Seminars
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Religious Freedom (Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Fall 2020, Fall 2021, Fall 2022, Fall 2023)
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Democracy and Disobedience (Fall 2021)
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Race, Citizenship, & Belonging (Spring 2024)
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Foucault & Friends (Fall 2021)
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Black Political Thought (Spring 2023)
University of California, Berkeley
Instructor of Record - Introductory and Intermediate Level
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The Supreme Court & Public Policy (Spring 2018)
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Democracy, Disobedience, & Resistance (Fall 2017)
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Law, Religion, & Culture (Fall 2017, Fall 2015)
Teaching Assistant - Intermediate and Advanced Level
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Legal Studies Honors Seminar (Lauren Edelman: Fall 2016, Spring 2017)
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Theories of Justice (Sarah Song: Fall 2009, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, Fall 2012)
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Feminist Jurisprudence (Kathryn Abrams: Summer 2010, Fall 2011, Summer 2012, Summer 2013, Spring 2014)
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Immigration & Citizenship (Leti Volpp: Spring 2013, Summer 2014)
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Rhetorical Interpretations of the Logo (Winnie Wong: Spring 2016)
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20th Century American Legal & Constitutional History (Ben Brown: Fall 2013)
Sample Syllabi
Capital Punishment
An advanced seminar course that explores the practices and experiences of capital punishment in the United States, with particular attention paid to not only how executions are litigated and administered, but also how these same executions create and sustain physical and psychic pain at the hands of the state.
Ordinary Law
An advanced introductory course that explores the lived experiences of everyday individuals under the law. The course explores the meaning of the rule of law, the role of judges and judicial reasoning, the contours of civil and tort law, the nature and history of punishment, policing, mass incarceration, and more.
Religious Freedom
An advanced seminar course that investigates historical and contemporary examples of the political, legal, and social regulation of religion in order to think critically about the realization of freedom, the promise of equality, and the operations of power in religiously plural liberal democratic states.
Evidence of Teaching Effectiveness
In the PDF attached, please find 1) a sample of my pedagogical awards and qualifications; 2) a summary analysis of my evaluations for five semesters of teaching, inclusive of select quantitative data and summative comments; and 3) full sets of evaluations for five semesters. I would be happy to provide additional sets of evaluations upon request.