My Approach to the Classroom

I conceptualize education as a student-centered, student-driven process. The role of an instructor, in my view, is to facilitate and encourage exploration while providing context, support, scaffolding, and experiences through which students can discover and develop their various human capacities. Regardless of topic or class size, I believe that students learn best when offered opportunities to authentically experience the practice of a discipline, and when they are expected to demonstrate (to the degree that they are capable) competence in the kinds of judgment and tasks which we expect of ourselves as scholars and as practitioners. This has a number of implications for how I organize courses and understand my task as an instructor, from which I highlight three key themes:

First, I design my courses so as to maximize opportunities for real-world or simulated experiences. I believe that whether at introductory or advanced levels, the primary goal of coursework is to train students to be able to think and intervene in the world as we do—in my case, as someone who carefully and critically examines urban processes as well as the sustainability of ecological and social systems.

Second, I emphasize the competing theoretical and empirical lenses which scholars and practitioners use in thinking about cities and sustainability. For example, in urban geography (my core sub-discipline), there are a number of theoretical traditions which, if adopted, suggest different approaches to the practice of urban development. Rather than focus on a historical progression of increasingly accurate “best practices,” I actively highlight the competing implications of different approaches, and strive to train students to choose, as appropriate, perspectives which help them with their goals both in my course and as a scholar and human being beyond.

Finally, I emphasize writing and oral communication as critical modalities with which students must have facility in order to be able to realize the goals which they are developing in their educational process. As a result, the deliverables I assign tend toward written projects and (where feasible) presentations, in which students are asked to persuade both their colleagues and myself of the positions they take (or the validity of their findings). I emphasize to students that it is not enough to understand what others have said about a particular topic; they should be able to communicate for themselves what they believe about it.

Overall, I believe that my task as an instructor is to facilitate experiences which help students to “grow into” their capacities as students, scholars, and practitioners of the topics which I teach. Sometimes this involves encouraging students to participate in classes in ways which they have not previously experienced: some of my most satisfying teaching experiences have been those in which students struggled but ultimately succeeded in communicating perspectives on course material which surprised both myself and their colleagues. While I guide students and shape the topics of their projects through the parameters I set, my goal is to provide as much freedom as possible for students to pursue their visions while still working through the themes which a course is built to explore.