Teaching Philosophy
As a teacher, I primarily view learning as a collective endeavor. Though I may be in the front of the room, my role is as a facilitator. I aim to create an environment that is welcoming, primed for inspiration and action, and ultimately affirming to each student’s ability to make intellectual progress.
Teaching an undergraduate course can represent a student’s first introduction to a specialized discipline. As an instructor, I aim to facilitate this primary interaction by centering it around inspiration. Inspiration is not handed down from on high but is nurtured. A mutually created classroom environment that values deductive reasoning but encourages self-reflection is the spark. As a teaching assistant for Environmental Chemistry at Cornell, I gave a brief lecture about Clair Patterson and his work with lead isotopic dating methods as a graduate student in the 1950's. With a small data set and some fundamental observations about isotope decay, the students were quickly off to attempting to estimate the age of the Earth themselves after the lecture.
I firmly believe that the classroom should be a place where everyone feels the ability to express themselves but not necessarily one where we are always comfortable. Challenge is the beginning of personal growth. I hope to create a space where both student and instructor are forced to reassess their preconceived views on how we use chemistry to understand the world around us. Portions of a course may challenge different students at varying levels and will require adaptive strategies. In Sustainable Agriculture, a large freshman course I was a teaching assistant for, we spent several lectures evaluating the sustainability of management practices used by dairy operations in upstate NY. After most of the students had formed clear cut views on what should be done, we went and toured actual farms and met the owners as well as the operating staff. After discussions with these stakeholders, many voiced social and economic concerns that were completely missing from their initial appraisals. New science is by definition grappling with a question with no sure answer. It is important to me that students learn to not only tolerate this feeling of uncertainty, but to embrace it as potential for growth.
I ultimately view the classroom as a place of affirmation, not in any specific ideology or technique, but in the ability of the student to hone their critical thinking skills. This affirmation comes through the presentation of challenging problem sets, group discussions, and projects as formative assessments along the way. By the end of the course, the student should be able to look back on their progress and feel they have discovered the subject material on their own terms. This ownership over the course material comes with a boost in self-confidence. Empowered and knowledgeable actors are needed to guide societal decisions about how we interact with our environment.