This year I am excited to join the faculty at Marquette University as a Teaching Assistant Professor for the Honors Program.
I have taught University courses for the last eight years of my career in both Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality studies. Before that I was a teaching assistant for various philosophy courses and ancient Greek language courses.
I focus on four key areas in my own pedagogical practice: relevance and ownership of learning, access and inclusion, fostering tools for critical thinking and engagement, and faculty and personal development.
Relevance and Ownership
Building relevance in a course is related to helping students feel ownership of their own learning. When students realize that the abstract philosophical concept they are learning about can have critical and immediate implications for how they live their own lives, they become eager and engaged participants in the classroom environment. To help foster this pedagogical experience I design assessments where students can reflect on their lived realities while practically engaging with their world.
Access and Inclusion
Two elements related to access and inclusion that I use in my courses are:
- variation in assessment techniques
- providing diverse representation that highlights different identities, social economic status, forms of content learning, and more.
I provide a variety of assessment formats so that students who come into courses with diverse abilities, strengths, and weaknesses have a chance to highlight their own strengths as well as work on their individual areas for improvement.
Community Engagement
As an interdisciplinary scholar I see opportunities for learning available in our local community and university environment. This includes giving students the opportunity to apply concepts they learned outside of the classroom in the larger public, friend circle, or even family community. I often have students engage with local art, activists, and community members.
I volunteer my time to helping students learn about the ancient Greek and Roman world. I recently visited a local sixth grade class and taught about textual transmission, reading papyrus, and the importance of myth in our modern world. We also put Socrates on trial.
Student-Centered Learning
One is always learning as a pedagogue. As such I integrate self-reflection practices into my teaching habits. My research in teaching and learning scholarship has shifted how I teach in my own classroom. In my most recent course I implemented backwards design and developed a learner-centered syllabus, two distinct but helpful pedagogical techniques which center learning objectives and students in design. These two changes to my methodology created a smoother learning environment with more transparent expectations for both student and professor.
Faculty Development
I worked for two years at the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence (Penn State) as a graduate student consultant in faculty development. With the flexibility in choosing our own programing to develop, I created workshops focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. I taught faculty and graduate students how to craft more inclusive classrooms, trained them in techniques and practices for navigating difficult topics in discussion, and educated on social justice principles.