As a teacher, my primary goal is to guide students in collaboratively acquiring analytic and methodological tools for unsettling conventional views about the world around them. Doing so first necessitates establishing a shared framework to orient students from different intellectual and social backgrounds. For example, my syllabi address aspects of the “hidden curriculum” like what to expect from office hours so that all students can benefit from course resources.[1] Students in many of my classes also negotiate a list of community norms for the semester, an activity—gleaned from a workshop I took on “Inclusive Learning in Online Education” during the pandemic—that both fosters shared norms and, when pertinent, stimulates sociological discussion about the role of norms in everyday life. Finally, I design my courses to meet the learning demands of the world beyond the classroom, such as creating opportunities for applying research methods and integrating critical approaches to AI to help students thoughtfully engage with groundbreaking tools like large language models (LLMs).
I bring slightly different approaches to topical and methods courses. In topical ones, I focus on “stranging the normal”—complicating otherwise taken-for-granted aspects of social life to get students to consider why things are the way they are and how people, organizations, and systems contribute to producing those realities. In Introductory Sociology, for instance, I have organized a lesson on the social construction of race around a historical chart depicting racial categories in the U.S. Census to stimulate discussion of race as a sociopolitical phenomenon. Students grapple with questions like: If race is biological, why have the categories for it changed so often? To help students relate to and critically engage social theory, I also developed an assignment called “Theory Unleashed.” A few students each week test the week’s theories by problematizing popular culture in their lives, presenting on everything from press releases to TikTok videos using their preferred medium. This approach challenges students to use theories and grapple with their scope and limits.
In methods courses, I emphasize practical research opportunities to build on classroom instruction on four distinct but interrelated aspects of methods: (1) their strengths for addressing empirical puzzles, (2) their assumptions and limitations, (3) their practical application, including any necessary technical skills, and (4) how to strongly and clearly communicate them and their findings. In a previous course on Methods of Social Research, for instance, I co-designed a semester-long project on neighborhood change in Harlem in which the class collaboratively fielded a survey and conducted in-depth interviews and participant observation. In designing the study instruments, students wrestled practically with questions like: What can we learn about neighborhood change from asking people closed questions? What is better suited for more unstructured conversation or direct observation? And what do we gain by triangulating them? Upon completion of fieldwork, teams of three to four students analyzed the full corpus of data and coauthored papers. The entire research process pushed students to weigh the relative strengths of different methodological tools while applying them.
I have honed my approach to teaching while serving on the teaching teams for undergraduate and graduate courses such as introductory sociology, quantitative methods, research design, qualitative methods, technology and society, and thesis seminars. You can find syllabi for some of these courses here. Students have consistently rated my performance at or above a 4 out of 5, often specifically emphasizing the role my enthusiasm and use of diverse mediums played in stimulating their intellectual curiosity and learning. In sum, I facilitate highly-rated collaborative learning environments in which students develop habits of mind for critically engaging both unquestioned views of the world and the methodological tools they use to investigate it.
[1] I credit sociologist Anthony Jack’s research for this insight.