"Skillful teaching is whatever helps students learn."
“Skillful teaching is whatever helps students learn.” That basic premise, neatly captured in Stephen Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher, is the crux of my approach to the undergraduate classroom.
In other words, given the demographic and attitudinal diversity of college students, the range of intellectual interests held by sociology majors, and the varied cognitive and emotional demands of courses across the liberal arts curriculum, I do not practice a one-size-fits-all pedagogical method. Instead, I rely on a flexible template that empowers students to be intellectually curious, question the taken-for-granted, pursue their own goals and personal growth, and value learning as a never-finished, lifelong endeavor.
That template revolves around Four C’s: creation, collaboration, connection, and change.
“Skillful teaching is whatever helps students learn.” That basic premise, neatly captured in Stephen Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher, is the crux of my approach to the undergraduate classroom.
In other words, given the demographic and attitudinal diversity of college students, the range of intellectual interests held by sociology majors, and the varied cognitive and emotional demands of courses across the liberal arts curriculum, I do not practice a one-size-fits-all pedagogical method. Instead, I rely on a flexible template that empowers students to be intellectually curious, question the taken-for-granted, pursue their own goals and personal growth, and value learning as a never-finished, lifelong endeavor.
That template revolves around Four C’s: creation, collaboration, connection, and change.
CREATE. Engineer opportunities for students to participate in the fundamental work of the university by conducting original sociological research.
Enabling students to do sociology—not just consume the field’s published work—is the cornerstone of my teaching practice. My first unit for WRI 109 (Sex Changes) epitomizes this setup. On the very first day of class, we dissect Nira Yuval-Davis’s “Gender and Nation” and learn to derive testable propositions from dense, jargon-laden social theory. In our next class, we turn to a “believing and doubting” exercise in which students use a curated bank of data visualizations to argue for and then against Yuval-Davis’s most central claims. The following week, we use online data analysis tools to look for surprising or significant associations among World Values Survey variables. Finally, before our first draft deadline, we deploy Occupational Ghettos as a model for converting statistical output into a meaningful academic argument.
Enabling students to do sociology—not just consume the field’s published work—is the cornerstone of my teaching practice. My first unit for WRI 109 (Sex Changes) epitomizes this setup. On the very first day of class, we dissect Nira Yuval-Davis’s “Gender and Nation” and learn to derive testable propositions from dense, jargon-laden social theory. In our next class, we turn to a “believing and doubting” exercise in which students use a curated bank of data visualizations to argue for and then against Yuval-Davis’s most central claims. The following week, we use online data analysis tools to look for surprising or significant associations among World Values Survey variables. Finally, before our first draft deadline, we deploy Occupational Ghettos as a model for converting statistical output into a meaningful academic argument.
COLLABORATE. Invest intellectual ownership in my students and empower them to guide themselves—and one another—through the learning process.
My trademark as a teacher is a cooperative, collegial style that pushes my students to take charge of the classroom—and, by extension, their own growth and learning. In SOC 300 (Claims and Evidence), for example, I taught research methods through “test driving.” In one week, my students and I honed our in-depth interviewing skills by querying one another on our social media use from the last week, and in another, we dispersed around campus to produce miniature ethnographies about Princeton culture. I then asked students to draw from those experiences to inductively determine the benefits and drawbacks of various data collection strategies—and to assess which methods might best fit their respective junior-year research projects.
My trademark as a teacher is a cooperative, collegial style that pushes my students to take charge of the classroom—and, by extension, their own growth and learning. In SOC 300 (Claims and Evidence), for example, I taught research methods through “test driving.” In one week, my students and I honed our in-depth interviewing skills by querying one another on our social media use from the last week, and in another, we dispersed around campus to produce miniature ethnographies about Princeton culture. I then asked students to draw from those experiences to inductively determine the benefits and drawbacks of various data collection strategies—and to assess which methods might best fit their respective junior-year research projects.
CONNECT. Forge meaningful links among students’ personal passions, other coursework, extracurricular experiences, and course materials.
Sociology's intellectual diversity is an ideal conduit for my third pedagogical pillar: linking course materials to social life beyond our classroom. For instance, in SOC 221 (Race, Class, Gender), we discussed the demographic composition of Princeton’s eating clubs as a way to grasp the everyday relevance of theories of intersectionality. Similarly, in WRI 108 (The Politics of Intimacy), students choose topics and data to study with increasing independence as the semester unfolds: first, they select General Social Survey variables from a curated list; second, they locate qualitative evidence
of sexual normativity on their own; and third, they consider any body of evidence related to the
course theme that piques their intellectual curiosity.
Sociology's intellectual diversity is an ideal conduit for my third pedagogical pillar: linking course materials to social life beyond our classroom. For instance, in SOC 221 (Race, Class, Gender), we discussed the demographic composition of Princeton’s eating clubs as a way to grasp the everyday relevance of theories of intersectionality. Similarly, in WRI 108 (The Politics of Intimacy), students choose topics and data to study with increasing independence as the semester unfolds: first, they select General Social Survey variables from a curated list; second, they locate qualitative evidence
of sexual normativity on their own; and third, they consider any body of evidence related to the
course theme that piques their intellectual curiosity.
CHANGE. Revise my teaching to increase student engagement, maximize learning, and enhance classroom inclusion.
I constantly engage the literature on undergraduate teaching to expand my pedagogical repertoire. In response to research on play in the college classroom, I bring Play-Doh to the WRI 108/109 session in which students learn to situate their writing within the “scholarly conversation” on their research topics. (I also took a bowlful to the professional development session I led for colleagues after finding that experiment succesful!) Like-wise, social-psychological studies find that an instructor's openness to student feedback can help ameliorate classroom inequalities. I thus make several pathways for reporting available to my students. One is a Google Form where they can anonymous recount joys, confusions, or frustrations with our course; another is All Our Ideas, in which I crowd-source topics of student interest to cover in class sessions set aside for their curiosities.
I constantly engage the literature on undergraduate teaching to expand my pedagogical repertoire. In response to research on play in the college classroom, I bring Play-Doh to the WRI 108/109 session in which students learn to situate their writing within the “scholarly conversation” on their research topics. (I also took a bowlful to the professional development session I led for colleagues after finding that experiment succesful!) Like-wise, social-psychological studies find that an instructor's openness to student feedback can help ameliorate classroom inequalities. I thus make several pathways for reporting available to my students. One is a Google Form where they can anonymous recount joys, confusions, or frustrations with our course; another is All Our Ideas, in which I crowd-source topics of student interest to cover in class sessions set aside for their curiosities.
