“That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students.”

—bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, 1994

Motivation and values

I was motivated to become an educator because the educators in my life had a profound impact on my intellectual and personal growth. So much, in fact, that I eventually decided—or perhaps more accurately, was called—to become that same person for the next generations. In this sense, I feel that it’s my goal to inspire all students in my classrooms about the spectacular and diverse biological world, and equip them with the intellectual, scientific, and social skills needed to understand the natural world and make informed decisions as professionals and citizens/community members. I ultimately believe that the what and how we teach have the potential to play a significant role on how students think critically, problem solve, work with others, and are empowered through learning and engaging with with one another.

Practice

My foremost aim as a professor is to create a learning environment that facilitates learning for all students; i.e., an inclusive and equitable learning environment. This looks different in each class that I teach, but it often means that I do the work to meet students where they are at to help them learn rather than teaching in a set way and making them adapt to me. In larger courses it’s more difficult for me to effectively observe learning of individuals, so I employ pedagogical tools and methods that are known to be inclusive and equitable.

I focusing much of my teaching on inspiring curiosity, creating knowledge, and critical thinking. I teach courses in organismal biology, ecology, and evolution, and these areas are complex and show tremendous diversity across the biological world. I often draw from diverse examples to showcase the incredible ways in which evolution has shaped life on Earth, but also to showcase how much there is still left to learn and that with enough curiosity students can find many unanswered questions in biology. Being curious leads to my practice of teaching students how knowledge is created in the biological sciences. This includes formulating strong hypotheses and scientific methodologies, but also the history of topics and how social factors affect scientific knowledge. Because social factors can affect science and because biology is still a fairly new and developing field, it is important for me to teach students how to use critical thinking to critique standing knowledge and when creating knowledge.

A more recent change to to my teaching practice has been one where I have been able to elevate the role of learning over that of grades. In short, for certain courses (e.g., ones with relatively few students) I have adopted grading schemes that are less punitive towards and more reflective for students in the form of contract and narrative grading, respectively. These fall along more liberating forms of grading, sometimes referred to as types of ungrading. Over the past couple of years experimenting, I have had unexpected and unprecedented levels of success by observing students being more courageous, having less fear of failure, being more open an honest about learning and their work, and feeling more empowered by having more control over their work and ultimate course grade.

Courses

Courses I have taught over my tenure at Colby College include:

• Evolution and Biodiversity (BI164): S24–22

• Ecology (BI271): F24, F22, F19–17; lab: F24, F19–17

• Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease: S20

• Evolutionary Analysis (BI320): S23, F21

• Population Modeling (BI382) with lab: F23–21, S20–18

• Biology Senior Seminar (BI401): S23, F22