Teaching

Teaching Principles

Students who take my classes learn to be better prepared to engage with complex multidisciplinary challenges in environmental studies. Learning to ask better questions prepares them to lead- or collaborate- on teams composed of people with different kinds of expertise and training, backgrounds, and commitments.

At the core of my approach is an essential claim: inquiry, as a practiced skill and a habit of mind, enriches the student experience of learning. Inquiry and collaboration are teachable capacities that serve not just instrumental ends, such as professional preparedness, civic leadership, or academic success, but also can become sources of private pleasure and catalysts for the social development of our students. 

My approach is grounded in my understanding of the fundamental mission of higher education in a time of multiplying crises: to build the capacity of our students to ask and answer questions about how we might most effectively respond. I am inspired to see many of my students motivated to ask the same kinds of questions that motivate me: what should we do? Where should we get started? 

Selected Courses

Syllabi, example assignments, and student evaluations of teaching available upon request.

HNRS 260 Society and Community Engagement – Honors College Connects: Environmental Nonprofits

Fall 2026

Students work in small groups to build collaborative and career readiness skills while working on key environmental issues with partner organizations that are environmental nonprofits and environmentally-focused municipal agencies. Projects include:

HNRS 360 Multi-Disciplinary Topics – Energy and Culture

Fall 2019, Fall 2021

What can we learn about culture by paying attention to energy systems? What can we learn about energy systems by seeing them in relation to culture? What is the connection between energy transition and cultural change? How might cultures and energy systems respond to global climate change? After surveying some of the major approaches to these questions, students worked in small groups to develop a literature review on a shared topic related to the course theme. Students then worked individually to develop their own research-based final deliverable that is connected to their group’s topic.

HNRS 360 Multi-Disciplinary Topics – Climate Change and Culture

Spring 2024

What can we learn about climate change by paying attention to culture? How will cultures change in response to climate change? What cultural forms are most compatible with living in a carbon-constrained world? How are cultural forms connected to resilience and adaptation in the face of a changing climate? After surveying some of the major approaches to these questions, students worked in small groups to develop a literature review on a shared topic related to the course theme. Students then worked individually to develop their own research-based final deliverable that is connected to their group’s topic.

HNRS 353 Technology in Contemporary Society – Clean Coal and Culture

Spring 2018

After a surveying the literature concerning coal culture and pollution management in the coal industries, students in this research seminar worked in small groups to develop an understanding of the relationships between “clean coal” and broader cultural and sociopolitical contexts. Each research group will focused on a different aspect of “clean coal”:

  • Political rhetoric concerning “clean coal” technologies
  • Industry and activist group’s representations of “clean coal” technologies
  • News media representations of “clean coal” technologies
  • Legal and regulatory context for “clean coal” technologies
  • Ethics of implementing “clean coal” technologies
  • Economics of “clean coal” technologies
  • Risk perceptions, risk communication, and “clean coal” technologies

Groups investigated the ongoing scholarly conversations about one such broad topical areas related to “clean coal” together; then, building off of this secondary research, students proposed and pursued an individually-managed research project that called on them to conduct some form of original analysis or primary
research. The final deliverables in this class included: class presentations, in-class discussions of research findings, and written investigations that were included on a public-facing website.

HNRS 360 Multi-Disciplinary Topics – Development of Modern Science (with Jim Trefil)

Fall 2025

Co-teaching with physicist and science writer Jim Trefil, we explored the development of science from the earliest times to 1900. The course covered Egyptian, Greek, Islamic, and European scientific developments. Students developed group research projects on themes related to the course.

My collaboration with Jim offered unique cross-disciplinary collaborative teaching opportunities for me, as I also had the opportunity to assist Jim’s introductory classes on Quantum Physics and Relativity in parallel with this co-teaching experience. We subsequently have been building on this relationship by co-authoring Our Coming Transition.

HNRS 360 / EIP 0900 Multi-Disciplinary Topics – Teaching Climate Change (with Melanie Fedri) / Climate Change and Civic Engagement Pre-Honors Seminar

Summer 2020

Funded by a grant from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, I led a team that created a summer class for students in the Early Identification Program, George Mason’s college access program for high school students who will be the first in their families to attend college. The purpose of these classes was to introduce these students to the excitement of college-level interdisciplinary inquiry. Our unique model provided learning experiences to undergraduate students enrolled in the HNRS 360 Multidisciplinary Topics – Teaching Climate Change class act, who learned about climate change by serving as mentors and teaching assistants for the faculty in the EIP Climate Change and Civic Engagement Pre-Honors Seminar. I led the team that developed the program, taught a section of EIP students, and co-taught the HNRS 360 class with Melanie Fedri.

HNRS 353 Technology in Contemporary Society – Science, Technology, and Power

Spring 2016, Spring 2017

How do new technologies affect social and political relationships? Conversely, how is the emergence of new technologies conditioned by social and political pressures? What role should the citizenry take in the production of new scientific knowledge and the regulation of new technologies? What are the limits to citizen participation in these processes? Students examined these questions in several important and interconnected spheres of contemporary society, especially paying attention to the linkages between domestic technology and technological change in the workplace. Beginning with lectures and discussions of these major strands in Science and Technology Studies, we pivoted to readings of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, Bruno Latour’s Aramis, and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, while students proposed and developed papers examining the cultural, social, environmental, political, and economic dimensions of technologies that were of interest to them. In the concluding weeks of the class, students read and debated each other’s work.

CULT 320 Globalization and Culture

Spring 2014

Students developed an interdisciplinary understanding of Globalization and Culture combining social science, history, literary studies, and visual cultural analysis. The focus was on building a conceptual vocabulary for thinking about the relationships between conjuncture and contingency, structure and agency, semiotics and political economy. Significant emphasis was put on the role of class and environment and students were encouraged to critically interrogate simple environmental and economic determinisms. Themes addressed included:

  • Contradictions in Ecuadorian oil extraction, examining the Yasuní-ITT Initiative and Suzana Sawyer’s ethnographic account Crude Chronicles,
  • Post-colonial approaches to development, focused on a close reading of Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Texaco),
  • The information technology supply chain, including analysis of both critical minerals and labor conditions for the manufacture of devices,
  • The political economy of fine art, with close attention to the art of Andrea Fraser and Ben Davis’s “9.5 Thesis on Art and Class”
  • The global trade in food commodities and fashion, and
  • Advertising culture.

HNRS 131 Contemporary Social Issues – Responses to Climate Change

Fall 2022, Fall 2023, Fall 2024, Fall 2025, Spring 2026

How are we responding to climate change? What responses are we planning? How might we respond in the future? Who is this “we” anyway? Students broadly agree that the answers to these questions are vital: climate change is reshaping patterns of migration, impacting human health, changing the availability and cost of necessities like water and food, increasing the frequency or severity of natural disasters, causing sea-level rise and coastal flooding, and more. However, because many of the activities that contribute most to climate change are deeply interwoven with our cultures, political systems, and economies, I call on students to learn how complicated and fraught action can be. In this reading and discussion-focused class, students engage with some significant responses to climate change, learn how groups and institutions are mobilized to respond, and explore what causes inaction.

HNRS 122 Reading the Arts – Climate Fiction

Spring 2025

What can we learn from fictional stories about living in a world with a changing climate? How do we personally respond to the climate futures they imagine? Why do certain genres and narrative arcs predominate in this literature? How do these stories relate to other important conversations about climate change? How do they reinforce or contest certain visions or ideologies about climate response? What else might be done with climate fiction? In this class, students read several works of fiction engaging with climate change and analyzed them closely, paying attention to how these stories work – and for whom. Students were called upon to put these stories into the context of projections emerging from the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways and with their broader conceptions of plausible climate futures. Students were also given the chance to write brief works of climate fiction themelves, using their own creativity to explore the genre.

HNRS 360/361/410–411 Thesis Proposal / Thesis / Multidisciplinary Research and Creative Projects Seminar

Instructor, Thesis Proposal and Thesis (Fall 2017–Spring 2019); Research and Creative Projects Seminar (Spring 2019–Spring 2023).

While the class evolved in name and course designation over several years, it remained essentially the same: in this class, students from across many disciplines developed research projects, creative projects, or applied projects of their own design, while pursuing the insights that emerge from developing these projects alongside a multidisciplinary group of peers. The differences of disciplinary training, professional paths, and interests provided occasions to learn to more carefully describe research methods, types of evidence, explanatory frameworks or theories, and major scholarly conversations in students’ fields. Additionally, students developed the skills necessary to represent their work effectively in writing, in discipline-appropriate visual forms (such as research posters or slide decks), and in formal and informal presentations.

In addition to my experience teaching these classes as the primary instructor after Spring 2017, I assisted Zofia Burr, dean of the Honors College from Spring 2016 to Spring 2017.

HNRS 110 Research Methods

Instructor (Fall 2015–Fall 2017); Teaching Assistant (Fall 2011–Fall 2013)

This multidisciplinary class was focused on helping students learn to situate their curiosity in relation to broader scholarly conversations, to ask better questions, to critically evaluate evidence from across multiple relevant fields, and to consider the background of their questions from multiple different perspectives. Because student curiosity covers virtually the full range of disciplines, these classes were necessarily places of profound epistemological and methodological multiplicity.

In addition to my experience teaching many sections of this class as the primary instructor starting in Fall 2015, I assisted Zofia Burr, dean of the Honors College; Eve Wiederhold, Assistant Professor of English; and Kevin Stoy, Honors College Living Learning Community Coordinator from 2011 to 2013.

NCLC 203 Inquiry to Action

Spring 2012, Spring 2013

This unique 6-credit, 7-week course provided students an opportunity to link practices of inquiry with questions of civic engagement. It was part a four class, year-long sequence in the New Century College called “cornerstones” that offered an alternative interdisciplinary general education core. Class sessions were organized around key questions involving civic engagement and information/media literacy: How will we address social problems in our local, national, and global communities? Which commentators or news sources do we trust to inform us about national and international events? Which scientific research helps us reach informed decisions and which research rests in faulty assumptions or poor research design? How might we critically evaluate the credibility of information to make educated decisions? And, how can we make interventions and engage others around issues that we care about in ways that are effective, informed by evidence, and ethical? The syllabus for this class was developed as part of a team. Most lessons and activities were taught inside 25-35 students sections, but some were presented to a larger group of approximately 120-150 students enrolled in the class.

Read about how I approach technology in the classroom