Teaching is an important pillar of my academic work and research process. Below are a few lesson plans and syllabi that I’m keen to share with other instructors, and which should give a sense of my teaching philosophy (and perhaps a few ideas you can use in your own classrooms?).
Climate & Culture: A course for upper level undergraduates with an emphasis on the cultural politics of climate change. It’s aimed at a mixed group of humanities/environmental studies students and includes an essay-writing emphasis in instruction and assessment.
Climate and Environmental Communication: A course for upper level environmental science/studies students looking to deepen their science communication and environmental advocacy skills.
Fashion & Power: A workshop course for upper level undergraduates that bridges the political economy, cultural semiotics, and embodied skills related to the garment and fiber craft industries. It culminates in the construction of a ‘garment that makes an argument.’
Intro to Media Studies: An introductory course for first-year students, designed to survey current and evolving issues in the economic, aesthetic, social and political affordances of digital media. It is grounded in discovery-based learning and the personal examples that students submit on a weekly basis for analysis and reflection.
Media & the Environment: An interdisciplinary seminar on current challenges in environmental communication, examining both the environmental impacts of media use and evolving strategies in media messaging. It can be adapted for undergraduate and graduate classes and has evaluation options for conventional research papers and research-creation projects.
Past Syllabi
Running Peer Review for First Year Students
When I teach an ‘Intro to the Research Essay’ course I like to structure the process through group peer review. Requiring students to produce multiple drafts of their final papers, and to formally review peer work and respond to peer assessment, helps students understand the process of academic research and write much better essays. Here’s my step-by-step guide & rubric for this process, taken from my Fall 2019 Climate Communication class.