Teaching
Along with my course design work with the Virtues and Vocations Project, I am a pedagogy contributor at the Blog of the American Philosophical Association, the Daily Nous, PEA Soup, and The Philosopher’s Cocoon. Previously, I was the Mellon Course Design Coordinator for the Philosophy as a Way of Life Project at the University of Notre Dame, and, before that, I began my career as an educator in Mississippi with Teach for America. Below, you will find a summary of my work on course design along with links to my popular teaching contributions.
Teach for America
Before graduate school, I was a full-time mathematics instructor with Teach for America, an organization that places highly-qualified teachers in low-income school districts. During the 2012-2013 academic year, the average mathematics ACT score of my classes rose from a 17.5 at the beginning of the academic year to a 22.4 at year’s end. For these efforts, I received the Rotary Award for Excellence in Education Service in 2012 and the Segal AmeriCorps Education Award in 2012 and 2013. Full student benchmark data for my time with Teach for America can be found here.
Mellon Course Design Coordinator
I worked with the Mellon Initiative, supervising a 10+ person team to create new Philosophy as a Way of Life courses at 13 colleges and universities, including Wesleyan University, Florida State University, and Boise State University, with the course at Wesleyan featured in the New York Times. To learn more about our course redesigns, feel free to read one of our case studies: (1) Living a Good Life at Wesleyan University, (2) Philosophy as a Way of Life at Florida State University, and (3) God and the Good Life at Boise State University.
AAPT Innovation in Teaching Grant
Conversations about race, class, and gender more often devolve into entrenched stand-offs than result in productive discussion, but research has shown that small dialogue groups are one of the best strategies for discussing these hot-button issues. For my Spring 2021 course, "The Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender", I was awarded a Grant for Innovation in Teaching from the American Association of Philosophy Teachers that allowed me to hire two under-represented students to serve as small-group discussion leaders. You can read more about this course, along with the grant findings, in my forthcoming Teaching Philosophy paper "Seeking to Understand" (with Zac Odermatt).
APA Seed Grants for the MAP Mentoring Program
Although the diversity of philosophy is increasing at the undergraduate level, there is still a significant gap between the percentage of underrepresented students that major in philosophy and the percentage that complete PhDs. In order to bridge this gap, this project plans to create three seed chapters of the Minorities and Philosophy Mentoring Program, an initiative that pairs underrepresented undergraduate students with graduate student mentors for support applying to graduate school.
