I teach at Muhlenberg College – a small liberal arts college in Allentown, Pennsylvania. My teaching is distinctly student centered. In practice, this means that I work hard to develop strong and individualized relationships with all of my students. My relationship with any student is also situated within a community, which means my teaching is also community-centered. Of course, attending to each student is easier to accomplish while working at a small liberal arts school. Although I have taught at larger universities with undergraduate and graduate students, Muhlenberg College is the best fit for my teaching style.
I explicitly work toward teaching students how to participate as learners within a community and to take interest in one another and in our community. In a time of increasing use of technology, it’s become more challenging to have students remain present for themselves and with each other, so I am continually looking for new ways to increase engagement. I hope to explore new strategies and reflect on ways I am experimenting in my posts on this blog.
I tend to focus on interdisciplinary learning. In most of my classes, students read original papers from a variety of disciplines, which allows them to become familiar and comfortable with discipline-specific terms and with the various disciplinary methods of attaining knowledge. I ask students to evaluate the strengths and weakness of any one approach. We ask “what is lost” and “what is gained?” We also explore how a discipline’s power and our own social identities might inform the questions we ask or the approaches we favored. This meta-process is important for students to develop information literacy and to understand their power and authority in creating ideas and information. This is where my feminism most shows up in the design of my classes.
The courses I teach, Psychology of Women & Gender, Inside/Out Prison Exchange, Multicultural Psychology, Clinical Case Studies, require students to deepened their psychological knowledge while also critically examining their own identity in relation to others. I am attentive to introducing and practicing cultural humility and self-awareness with students during class activities. A goal for me is to help students develop the interpersonal and intrapersonal skills needed to discuss complicated, often politically-charged, issues without relying on reductionist answers. Ultimately, I aim to create a classroom environment where there is a high level of trust that allows for curiosity, inclusivity, responsibility, and risk-taking.
I also enjoy and regularly teach Research Methods. In 2021, I revised my Research Methods & Statistics course with renewed attention toward anti-racist pedagogies, and I hope to share more about this in future posts. Research Methods is notoriously rigorous, and students often come into it with a great deal of anxiety. I approach this class with small lectures followed by lab activities that help students apply their learning. In addition to learning core content in research design, ethics, measurement, information literacy, and data analysis procedures, I also focus on the development of skills necessary to work collaboratively in a research team.
I am an active researcher and almost always include students in my research projects. I mentor students through the process of conducting psychological research, and they are expected to take initiative on all aspects, including literature review, research design, IRB submission, developing surveys using Qualtrics, participant recruitment via MTurk/Algolia, data analyses using SPSS, and construction of APA-style presentations and/or papers. On a typical day, I can be found at a table, sharing coffee and working with students on their SPSS analyses or engaging in a community writing session. My goal is for students to understand and value the process of writing as a way to clarify thinking, to find their own voice in that process, to feel a sense of belonging to our research team, and to experience joy in exploring and creating together.
Finally, most of my classes draw heavily from transformative pedagogies, including those inspired by bell hooks and Paulo Freire. This means that, in addition to teaching core content, I am also attentive to civic engagement and action. I regularly collaborate with community members in order to address some of the more complicated issues we collectively face. The best example of my work in this area is the community-based initiative I started in June 2013, after completing an intensive 9-day training in the Inside–Out Prison Exchange Program. Typically reserved for faculty in Criminology, I adapted the traditional Inside/Out curriculum to more closely align with psychology, and in 2015, I brought the first Inside/Out Prison Exchange class to Muhlenberg College.
My Inside/Out class brings college students together with students who are incarcerated to study as classmates in a prison setting. The Inside-Out Program is a semester-long academic course, meeting once a week, through which 15 to 18 “outside” (i.e., undergraduate) students and the same number of “inside” (i.e., incarcerated) students attend class together. All students read a variety of texts and write several papers; during class sessions, students discuss social dilemmas in small and large groups. Students also work together on a semester-long project that specifically addresses one component of mass incarceration as it relates to our local community. They present their projects during an end-of-semester event, attended by community stake-holders. Alums from these classes continue to meet monthly to develop and facilitate comprehensive trainings and public education reform workshops. You can learn more about this work on the program’s website.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely someone who is also passionate about teaching. I’m excited to share perspectives on teaching in this blog and hope you will reach out with your thoughts too. Feminist teaching is ultimately a community endeavor, and I hope we can use this space to build a collaborative hub of ideas, activities, and assignments.