Teaching
Teaching through growth, adaptability, and real-world connections
Despite a childhood desire to be a scientist, academia was not my first career. My career path took a 12-year detour into the service industry, where I had the privilege of learning so much that has informed my pedagogical approach. I learned how failure and mistakes can yield success and innovation. I learned to adapt, leveraging changes in technology and culture to navigate difficult circumstances. I learned how to teach information and skills in a relatable manner. The skills and philosophies I developed benefit me even now and have informed my three principles of teaching: Growth, Innovation, and Realness.
The principle of Growth has, at its foundation, a willingness to fail. Often, I find that students are afraid of failure, so they do not even engage with topics unless they are certain of success. This understanding has led to me to encourage my students to answer questions wrong, to fail at some tasks, and to learn from those failures. My own students have responded quite favorably to this, with one student saying that she was “not scared to speak up anymore or get the answers wrong.” The principle of Innovation is one of adaptability. We live in a rapidly changing world that requires innovation in the classroom and in mentorship. We must address, and navigate, new technologies and new normals. But more than that, we can still innovate in our approaches to teaching. In my own class, I bring in research methodologies like Photovoice as a learning tool. My students take the time to tell their own stories, linking their learning to their own real lives. In some cases, it yields beautiful outcomes like one student who chose to tell her story through a website she designed. Finally, the principle of Realness is based in a single question: “what does this have to do with me?” It is not enough to simply provide materials to students who often view topics in an abstract manner. We must adapt our teachings to students frames of reference by bringing the real world into the classroom and bringing the classroom into the real world. Rather than simply telling individuals that a paired t-test reduces error variance, we can have students rate their feelings of happiness before and after showing a video of two ferrets playing in a box of packing peanuts and perform analyses in real time using real data. The classroom must also extend into the world. In my pedagogical practice, I provide my students the tools to bring their learning into the real world. I teach students how to understand news about research topics, and how to apply a critical lens to larger-than-life claims.
My research and my own experiences position me well to continue my mission of educating future thinkers and researchers, both at the undergraduate and graduate level. There is a world outside of the classroom. Through the principles of Growth, Innovation, and Realness, I have successfully and positively impacted my students, empowering them to grow and change and make their own impact on the world. This success is demonstrated in consistently high course evaluations, while being recognized through VCU Department of Psychology’s Outstanding Student Teacher award. My scholarship and my experiences as an instructor have prepared me to teach courses related to experimental methods and statistics at both the graduate and undergraduate level. Further, my work positions me to teach more topical courses related to gender, misinformation, and social and health psychology. In teaching, we can bring a wealth of information to a new generation of scholars, and, in doing so, we advance our field while impacting the world around us.