TEACHING PHILOSOPHY
My mission as an educator across the academic and professional disciplines of social work and higher education administration is to inspire and prepare students to contribute to a socially just world through meaningful and impactful professional service. This mission includes developing a commitment for social change at the individual, communal, and institutional levels of society that begins with oneself as a holistic person. I draw inspiration for my work in the words of W. B. Yeats who said, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” My goal is to light a fire within students to generate passion in their field, optimism for a better world, and a sense of urgency to contribute to social change.
The purpose of higher education is to two-fold: to educate future generations of citizens for a lifetime of meaningful service and to produce knowledge – both in service for the betterment of society. These dual purposes are inseparably manifested in my role as an educator of college students. I facilitate knowledge production within individual students, a community of student learners, and within the local campus which extends into the local community.
When designing educational experiences for students, I create highly structured and adaptable course designs. I utilize backwards course design principles and map the relationships between intended intentionally-designed activities with student learning outcomes based upon Bloom’s taxonomy. Within each class experience, I sequence activities to draw out students’ prior knowledge, expose them to new information and ideas, cultivate collective meaning-making across our unique positionalities and discuss the implications within society. Across class experiences, I utilize an iterative process to cultivate mastery through activities and assignments which replicates and integrates old and new knowledge. I draw heavily from both Perry’s cognitive learning theory and Vygotsky’s sociocultural learning theory to create learning environments that are learner-centered, knowledge centered, community-centered and assessment-centered. My favored activities include semi-structured dialogue, experiential-learning activities and simulations, guided self-reflection, collaborative case studies and brief lecturettes.
My educational practice is ontologically, epistemologically, and pedagogically rooted in Paulo Freire’s approach to learning. I adopt a constructivist approach to knowledge development and believe that the educators must simultaneously tap into students’ native wisdom while embracing our educational directivity to guide students’ knowledge and skill development in tangible ways. If we are to prepare students for a life of meaningful service in the world, we must teach them to simultaneously “read the word” of our disciplines as well as “read the world” in which they hope to serve. Praxis and the cultivation of critical consciousness in conjunction with course content are core to my teaching practice. As such, my personal values of student-directed learning, experiential learning, social justice and inclusion, transparency, and connectedness align with my educational practice in ways that cultivate authentic relationships with my students.
In both fields of higher education a social work, students have an obligation to provide high quality services to college students and marginalized communities respectively. As such, it is essential students develop necessary knowledge, awareness and skills to competently practice in the field. While backwards course design is essential, intentional use of ongoing formative assessment is critical. I believe it is important to provide students with regular concrete, tailored feedback on their work to cultivate appropriate development. When incorporated frequently during the life of the course, criterion-based summative assessments can be trusted to accurately demonstrate students’ ability to meet those core learning outcomes essential to the field. I use analytic rubrics for all assignments that explicitly detail the learning expectations expected of students and clearly articulate the relationships between demonstrated work and grades. When students know the expectations and are encouraged to work toward the point total of their choosing, students have the opportunity to determine the type of professional in the field they aspire to be.