My teaching philosophy can be summed up with the following quote, from Jacob Bronowski:

 

"It is important that students bring a certain ragamuffin, barefoot irreverence to their studies; they are not here to worship what is known, but to question it."

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As a college-level instructor, I believe that my job is to help students develop a set of tools that they can use to interact with, learn from, and teach the world around them. The contents of this tool box vary across courses:

 

In university-wide, lower-level courses such as Introductory Psychology, this includes developing skills such as scientific literacy and being able to identify what research looks like, in addition to learning about the scientific basis of socially-relevant topics such as discrimination, sexual orientation, and gender.

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Courses such as Psychology as a Science focus on how students can interact with media in a safe way and the ways in which the basics of psychological science can inform the "real world" (e.g., eyewitness testimony).

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Upper-division elective courses such as Health Psychology include content that can be applied directly to future careers, including models of behavioral change, cisnormative health care systems (and how to change them), and helping yourself and others effectively manage stress.

 

Throughout all of these courses, students frequently discuss topics with their classmates, work on activities in class that utilize online information, and complete assignments that allow them to hone their writing skills. Examples of how I accomplish these goals can be found in my syllabi, under the "Courses Taught" tab, as well as under "Resources."

 

I further believe it is my responsibility to do this kind of training in an environment that, to the extent possible, removes institutional and systematic barriers to success.

 

A monstrous barrier to success, particularly for lower income students, is the high cost of textbooks and other course materials. In Psychology as a Science, I searched for and found a text that students could read for free through our library, supplementing with journal articles and chapters from sources such as Noba, and my Introductory Psychology courses use OpenStax Psychology, a free/open textbook. I am currently engaged in a project to diversify the OpenStax Psychology book to ensure that this free resource appropriately covers the breadth of people engaged in psychological science, practice, and history. I was awarded an Affordable Learning Grant for Summer 2018 to develop an open educational resource for Psychology as a Science that can be used by other instructors. I have also been named an Open Educational Resources research fellow for the 2018-2019 academic year. In addition to free or low-cost texts, students frequently utilize free programs such as Kahoot!, Padlet, and Slack.

 

In all courses, students are provided with a list of campus resources such as food and clothing banks, in addition to syllabi statements about making sure their basic needs are met.

 

To ensure that first-generation students are not at a disadvantage when it comes to course documents, my syllabi are multimodal and written in plain language, designed to be accommodating for students with all levels of backgrounds with higher education.

 

Finally, I take concerted steps to reduce stereotype threat by being open about my working class, first generation background. This includes, for example, telling the story about how I almost lost my scholarship my freshman year because I just "didn't know how to college," and discussing the time management skills I learned while working multiple jobs as a full-time undergraduate student. In doing so, I hope to model what resilience and success in college can look like for first-generation (and all) students. I additionally pursue training that emphasizes these values, including serving as the inaugural CLASP Faculty Fellow, beginning in 2017. 

 

Overall, I hope these types of classroom policies and perspectives contribute to a more equitable higher education system.