My approach to teaching is intrinsically connected to my own experience as a first-generation college student at a large public university. I felt like a fish out of water in more ways than one, and success in the classroom often felt like a distant and opaque concept, mentioned but never explained. Thankfully, I had great instructors throughout my education who demonstrated how I can best approach teaching. I believe learning can be hard for everyone, and it is an instructor’s job to make it less so. My philosophy of teaching is thus structured around three pillars that make student learning and expectations clear and achievable. The pillars are creating an accessible and supportive learning environment, real-world applications and lessons, and flexibility to meet students’ needs.

For the first of these pillars, I strive to foster an accessible and supportive learning space for all students. My teaching philosophy begins with the recognition that people experience higher education differently, which can make asking for help and succeeding difficult. From my own experience, I learned just how harsh students can be on themselves. I believe it is my responsibility as an instructor to make each student feel supported in the classroom.

         One of the ways I strive for an accessible teaching approach is by providing both clear standards for my students as well as examples. For example, I am currently teaching Introduction to International Politics, a course I designed and structured myself, and in this class, I assign students a current events analysis paper where they were to choose any event in recent news cycles that pertained to the class and analyze the event with ideas and concepts they learned from class. Rather than assigning this project without further guidance as to what a good submission would entail, I provide all students with my own paper, written for the same purpose to the same standards. This gives them a tangible example of what success can look like for their work, although I always stress to students that their own work does not need to mirror mine to be well done.

Further, I require students to submit their topics to me ahead of time so I can approve them and provide initial feedback on how to continue with the short paper. This helps reduce the costs on the student for trying a new idea or exploring an event they found interesting but were not sure applied to the class. Being able to pick their own topic can help them see that studying politics is something for all majors. Success and learning should never be hidden from students, but rather provided by the instructor. Through this, I believe I show my students what success looks like, how they can achieve it, as well as opportunities for feedback along the way.

The second pillar of my teaching philosophy is real-world applicability and lessons, which emphasizes demonstrating why learning matters for all students, regardless of their interest in politics, and applying it to their own world. I always make it clear to my students that it is okay if they have little interest in politics, but I also make sure to show them why international politics matters. For a concept that can feel detached from everyday life, I demonstrate how international politics will someday be important for all of them and how to understand and analyze international politics.

I address this in my teaching with a current events analysis paper, where students must identify an ongoing event in international politics, such as a war, trade dispute, refugee flow, or climate treaty. With this event, they must identify key themes or ideas present in the event that they can analyze using what they have learned in class. My goal with this assignment is to train all students to understand why things happen around the world, a lesson that will stick with them beyond the classroom. Furthermore, I want to show students how what they learn in class can be applied in real life. I believe demonstrating how learning can be useful in everyday life helps students retain lessons better. My background in undergraduate research as a McNair scholar also influences this project, as I want to encourage students to learn the basics of research and critical thought.

This assignment is how I evaluate student learning, as my goal is not for students to retain every piece of information I give them, but rather to train them to think critically and communicate their interpretations of political events. If I can see students effectively communicating their understanding of class material and world events, I know they are learning. Thus, when students take my class, they are not only learning about an abstract theory of power and politics, but they are connecting real-world events to their own experience. They are also learning to communicate these connections to others so they can share what they have learned.

The last pillar of my teaching philosophy is flexibility to student needs, which I understand as the instructor’s ability to adapt how they teach to help students learn. Every person learns differently, and while I cannot tailor lectures for each specific student, I can diversify the examples I use for learning. I incorporate this into my teaching by using diverse examples and learning activities. For example, I am a very visual learner, and I love maps. I believe that while a picture may be worth a thousand words, a map is worth all human history. Being able to connect grand theories and ideas to specific points of the earth where people live always engages my brain. So, when I lecture, I like to incorporate maps and visual tools into my teaching.

However, I know not all students are interested in a visual approach to learning, so I plan on incorporating experiential learning into my classroom as well. I have attended and helped organize multiple student learning simulations while in graduate school. One simulation I helped organize while a teaching assistant in Introduction to American Foreign Policy was a zombie apocalypse simulation, where students had to decide between conflict and cooperation with other groups in the face of a looming threat! I recall seeing students discover core ideas of international politics from these interactions, such as one who exclaimed, “I want to work with the other group, but we do not have enough information to know if we can trust them”. Rather than reading Fearon’s 1994 piece on rationalist explanations for war and learning about information asymmetries, students made a memory by discovering it themselves.

The last way I apply an adaptable teaching style is by leaving room for a student-picked topic at the end of the semester. After lecturing on the outlined course material for a semester, students may have had tangents they wish we had gone on for a specific topic, questions left unanswered about another, or even a topic that was not addressed in the class that they wanted to learn about. By changing one class out of the year into a voted-on student choice topic, I hope to encourage students to communicate their academic interests and ask questions they want the answers to. With these pillars of my teaching philosophy, I foster an open learning environment where all students feel encouraged to ask questions and succeed in their academic journey.