Teaching Philosophy
My teaching philosophy comprises six interconnected components: three principles and three practices, rooted in contemporary pedagogical theory. The principles set the orientation of a course — who it is for, how students will engage with the material, and how its parts hang together. The practices set the day-to-day disposition of the classroom — how community is built, how the physical space is used, and how I refine my own teaching over time.
Inclusive Teaching
Inclusive teaching means recognizing and working with the diversity of backgrounds, preparation, and learning preferences that any given class brings into the room. In practice, that means offering varied paths into the material — passive and active, individual and collaborative — and pairing them with multiple modes of assessment, both synchronous and asynchronous, so that no single format becomes a bottleneck for who can show what they know. Course readings are chosen to put a wide range of voices and perspectives in conversation with the canonical literature, rather than appended to it. The goal is not to soften standards but to widen the set of routes students can take to meet them.
Active Learning
A class session is organized around the assumption that students learn by doing rather than by watching. Each plan includes structured opportunities for students to apply the concepts on their own terms — through short exercises, paired and small-group discussion, and case-based activities that push them past passive recognition. I lean on quick applications of theoretical concepts to hypothetical scenarios, and on systematic connections between assigned readings and current events, as the two formats that most reliably surface where understanding is thin. Lecture remains part of the toolkit, but as scaffolding for student work rather than its replacement.
Backward Design
Course material, class plans, activities, and assignments all stem from learning objectives, articulated at both the course level and the session level and designed for a specific target student body. The objectives come first; the syllabus, the readings, and the in-class activities follow. Working in this direction keeps each session accountable to a concrete outcome, and it makes the relationships between readings, exercises, and assessments legible to students rather than implicit. It also forces me to drop material that does not earn its place — however interesting in the abstract, however much I would enjoy teaching it.
Building Community
The goal of the first weeks of any course is to build a class environment that is positive, collaborative, and fun — a cohesive and supportive community in which students feel free to take intellectual risks. That climate does not happen by accident: it is produced by small, deliberate moves in the opening sessions and reinforced by the rhythms of every meeting that follows. When the community is in place, students participate spontaneously, ask the questions they would otherwise self-censor, and treat each other’s contributions as material to think with. When it is not, even a strong syllabus underperforms.
Embodied Pedagogy
I treat the classroom as a physical space, not just a discursive one. Class plans deliberately incorporate movement, rearrangement of the room, and interaction with objects as ways of grounding abstract concepts in something students can see and handle. Embodied moves give a class a tempo it would not otherwise have, and they create room for students who think best when their bodies are also engaged. The downloadable policy page below describes how I structure these activities and sets out the ground rules I share with students at the start of the term.
Instructor Reflexivity
Teaching is a practice, and like any practice it benefits from sustained reflection. I keep a running record of what worked and what did not — at the session level and at the course level — and revise specific materials and broader strategies on that basis between iterations. Reflexivity also means staying current: tracking new pedagogical research, observing colleagues’ classes when I can, and trying unfamiliar techniques in low-stakes settings before committing to them in a flagship course. The instructor’s own development is part of the course design, not a side project.