As a multidisciplinary thinker and researcher, I often find myself moving between academic communities that value different questions and different ways to answer them. I began my training in Literature and Theology, completed my Ph.D. in Psychology, and now work in a research center guided by a Public Health model. Along the way I learned techniques from sociology and launched collaborations with Human-Computer Interaction and Pedagogy researchers.
Learning to move between these groups has required seeing each approach as a scholarly lens that views the same problems from multiple angles. By switching between these lenses, I have been able to expand my perspective, finding solutions to problems where I would have been stuck if I limited myself to one approach. I believe that my work as an educator is to train students to see the world through the lenses that I am most capable with as a researcher, clinician, and statistician. Training students to inhabit these perspectives gives them a new way to see the world and interpret their experiences.
At the same time, my own clinical and research work has taught me to recognize the limitations of any single point of view. From this position, the approach of a professional discipline should not be seen as authoritative, but as an additional perspective to complement one's own personal experience and knowledge. Emphasizing flow between perspectives helps keep the process of teaching from becoming a process of indoctrination, as students learn to value both their own unique points of view as well as the ability to shift between different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. My goal is to train students to be flexible thinkers who can approach problems “like a psychologist” while also recognizing the strengths and limitations of the approach.
Learning to move between these groups has required seeing each approach as a scholarly lens that views the same problems from multiple angles. By switching between these lenses, I have been able to expand my perspective, finding solutions to problems where I would have been stuck if I limited myself to one approach. I believe that my work as an educator is to train students to see the world through the lenses that I am most capable with as a researcher, clinician, and statistician. Training students to inhabit these perspectives gives them a new way to see the world and interpret their experiences.
At the same time, my own clinical and research work has taught me to recognize the limitations of any single point of view. From this position, the approach of a professional discipline should not be seen as authoritative, but as an additional perspective to complement one's own personal experience and knowledge. Emphasizing flow between perspectives helps keep the process of teaching from becoming a process of indoctrination, as students learn to value both their own unique points of view as well as the ability to shift between different ways of looking at the same phenomenon. My goal is to train students to be flexible thinkers who can approach problems “like a psychologist” while also recognizing the strengths and limitations of the approach.
Designing Courses around Modes of Inquiry
My central goal of helping students see from new perspectives informs my basic philosophy of course design. I have often restructured my syllabi and lectures themselves around familiarizing students with modes of inquiry rather than content areas themselves.
Example Course Designs:
Example Course Designs:
- My Psychology of Gender course had its syllabus divided around 4 different subfields in psychology rather than specific topics. Although we focused a significant amount of class time to gender-based violence (e.g., mass-shootings by cis-males; intimate partner violence; etc.), using this inquiry frame rather than a content frame allowed students to return to this prominent social phenomenon through a new lens every few sessions.
- My Looking for Love in the 21st Century course built on my own research by showing the complementary roles of different views on love from philosophy, anthropology, neuroscience, and psychology. This gave students the ability to apply these lenses to their own experiences.
Student Centered Class Discussion
Effective class discussion should open students up to the possibility that every one of their classmates' viewpoints has unique value. Bringing students' personal experiences to bear on class discussion helps them evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different psychological models, as students can see the limitations of a specific theory or methodology to account for the very real experiences shared by their classmates.
Techniques I Use:
Techniques I Use:
- Effective exchange is only possible if every student feels able to share their own personal experiences. I draw from my group therapy experiences to lead class discussions where students can bring in their own experiences without fear of judgment (see my Course Evaluations).
- I try to conduct my lecture sections as an extended conversation with my students by actively incorporating student input into my lectures. All discussion board posts, e-mailed questions, or comments sent to me more than an hour before class will lead to adjustments to that week's lecture, as I will research information to answer questions or use student comments as a platform for discussion (see these Example Slides).
Problem Based Learning
To truly evaluate students' ability to think like scholars, I try to create as many opportunities as possible for them to conduct work that reflects scholarly activitiy..
Example Assignments:
Example Assignments:
- In a course where students are expected to learn how to apply theories to normal life, I often create exam questions where students are asked to read a brief narrative and use theories from class in order to explain what is occurring in that narrative. While this might make exams and student work much more labor intensive to grade on my part, I often find that these same assessments provide much clearer insight into how students are adopting the scholarly lenses introduced in class.
- My Statistics for the Social Sciences course transformed the previous curriculum using a "partial flip" model that included twice-weekly group-based problems akin to a "lab section" in a science course. The lessons of this innovation was carried over to a larger collaboration with the statistics department using a UR STEM Foundation Initiative Grant to support a total flip of an existing statistics course;.
- Rather than simply having students conduct a spin-off analysis in a project I have already created, I help students take the initiative to develop their own projects from the ground up (See my list of Mentored Student Projects for examples).
Commitment to Fostering Diverse Scholars
One aspect cutting across all of my relationship research as a whole has been the commitment to expanding our psychological models to better capture the full diversity of human experience. I do not simply see this as an intellectual pursuit, but a moral commitment to using psychology to address the profound inequalities across many levels of society.
Over my decade of psychology research and teaching, I have come to believe that many of the limitations of our field are a necessary consequence of having the work conducted by a largely homogenous group of researchers. Even my own ability to expand these theories is likely limited by my own blind spots and my acculturation into dominant ideals about love and relationships. Thus, the most effective way I can help widen the focus of our scholarship is by encouraging a wider diversity of students to bring their own knowledge into academic communities.
Efforts to Attract a Greater Diversity of Students in Psychology:
Over my decade of psychology research and teaching, I have come to believe that many of the limitations of our field are a necessary consequence of having the work conducted by a largely homogenous group of researchers. Even my own ability to expand these theories is likely limited by my own blind spots and my acculturation into dominant ideals about love and relationships. Thus, the most effective way I can help widen the focus of our scholarship is by encouraging a wider diversity of students to bring their own knowledge into academic communities.
Efforts to Attract a Greater Diversity of Students in Psychology:
- As educational research has suggested that difficulty with math skills is one key barrier leading to students withdrawing from science majors, I spent three summer (2015-2017) as the Instructor of Record for a statistics course in University of Rochester's Early Connection Opportunity (ECO) program, an introductory summer program for incoming first generation college students.
- Participated in a Panel Discussion at UR Diversity Conference on "What do you stand for in the classroom?" which focused on facilitation inclusive classroom discussions.
- Over the course of my graduate career, I have directly mentored over 40 undergraduate research assistants. Due to the content of my research, a large portion of my research assistants were BIPOC students and LGBTQ students.
- During my graduate career, I directly oversaw two Honors Theses (testimony available on request), both by foreign born students.