Teaching is an integral part of my work as a faculty member. I love teaching and I work hard at improving how I teach so that my students can learn in inclusive and dignity-producing ways. In my teaching, I engage diversity as an intellectual and a pedagogical resource through what and how I teach. The content of my courses focuses on studying, identifying, and leveraging the heterogeneity of our experiences - including racialized, cultural, linguistic, gendered, and classed - to organize meaningful learning. I aim to build what Barbara Rogoff (1994) calls 鈥渃ommunities of learners鈥� (Rogoff, 1994) in my classes, which means that I position everyone in class to be both a 鈥渓earner鈥� and a 鈥渢eacher鈥�. This is a powerful way for us to engage in expansive learning that is responsive to who we are and who we want to become.听
Courses taught:
EDUC 4411: Educational Psychology for Elementary School
To teach effectively, teachers need to know a great deal about their students. In this course, we will focus on three core questions:
- How do children learn, and what influences how they learn?
- How does this affect how we approach classroom teaching?
- How can educational psychology help us better understand how to create effective learning environments?
This course aims to introduce students to some aspects of the nature of learning, and of the relation between learning and teaching.听 While it is not meant to familiarize you with the 鈥渋ns and outs鈥� of classroom teaching, we will spend time in class discussing your practicum experiences in relation to theories of learning and will refer to recent research to guide your practice in classrooms.
Learning to teach can be challenging because it involves moving between the general and the particular, theory and practice, our own experiences as learners and teachers, and the experiences of others. In this class, we will address these challenges through readings, discussion, activities, writing, and lectures about learning and teaching.听 To further enrich your understanding of learning to teach, we will also share, discuss, and analyze your experiences at your practicum sites.
EDUC 6318: Psychological Foundations of Education
This course is meant to be an introduction to the field of educational psychology with a particular emphasis on theories of learning. In this course, we will address the following interrelated questions through our collective reading and discussions
- How do people learn?
- How do theories of learning affect how we organize teaching and learning in classrooms?
- How has the field of educational psychology contributed to and shaped our understanding of the above issues?
I鈥檝e designed course readings and assignments so you can go in-depth into selected topics that I think are central to understanding the psychological foundations of education.听 I have chosen to go for depth rather than breadth in this course so you will gain a sense of the general kinds of issues that are studied in educational psychology as well as the approaches that are taken to study them.听
As I see it, your main task as a student in this class is to try to relate what you are learning in class with what you know about the world, schooling, subject matter, how people learn in and out of school, and about yourself.听 You will have many opportunities to share the connections you are making in our discussions and in your writing.听
EDUC 8260: Qualitative Methods II
This required course for first-year doctoral students in Education focuses on the nature and processes of qualitative research; it is designed to extend and elaborate on the topics covered in Qualitative Methods I. 听In this class, you will read book-length qualitative studies to appreciate how researchers conducted their studies, analyzed their data, encountered difficulties and opportunities 鈥渋n the field,鈥� and wrote about their findings. 听You will also read articles specifically about conducting, analyzing, and writing about qualitative research. 听While the readings are a critical part of this class, I think of the course as more of a workshop than a seminar; that is, class sessions are focused more on activities related to doing the work of qualitative research than on discussing readings. 听Class sessions include mini-lectures on topics listed in the syllabus, discussions grounded in students鈥� projects as they relate to readings, and a variety of classroom exercises meant to engage students in practices I have identified as central to doing qualitative research and becoming educational researchers (e.g., developing a coding system, writing analytic memos that aim to integrate insights from diverse sources of data).
In this course, I hope you will:
- extend your understanding of the goals and nature of qualitative research;
- gain an appreciation for the process of qualitative research, and;
- develop the professional skills of analytic and integrative thinking and writing.
EDUC 8358: Discourse as a Context for Learning
The view of learning taken in this course is informed by sociocultural theories and situated analyses of interaction and participation (e.g., Lave & Wenger, 1991) that consider how learning and membership in a community are mediated by talk, embodied activity, artifacts, and broad notions of social practice. 听The approach to studying learning as it occurs in culturally and historically organized settings is informed primarily by micro-ethnographic analyses that aim to understand what is happening in an interaction and what it means from the perspective of the participants involved in the activity.
This course is intended to help you:
- gain a better understanding of research on the role of discourse in learning; and
- develop a familiarity through readings and hands-on experience with some of the concepts and methods used to study discourse.
Course readings, discussions, and other activities are meant to help you get a sense of the kinds of questions one might ask about the roles of discourse in learning, the issues involved in constructing and representing transcripts, and the process of developing an analysis based on the close study of talk and interactions between people in socially and culturally organized settings.听
