Teaching Philosophy
My sole function as a teacher is to introduce students to a structural way of thinking. Sociologists regularly think of structures. We think so much about them that our reference to them carries the weight as water. Structures flow effortlessly around us; we do not realize water's weight until we are drowning in it. My teaching philosophy forms around the integration of my research and my teaching to understand both the nimbleness and suffocating nature of structures of ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms.
As a profession that specializes in the study of social life, our usage of the term, `structure', is often taken for granted. The processes undergirding structures have become an implicit understandings about how the world naturally works. We export this concept of `structure' to every facet of social life -- from ideologies to actions and to organizations, even to our bodies -- failing many times to appreciate its complexities. As a teacher, my philosophy is to make plain the ways that structures of ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms get into the bodies, minds, and souls of people worldwide
The complexities of structure weighs heavily on the study of ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms. Innately structural systems, ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms are typically within the discipline treated as individual artifacts. Such individuation of a structural systems belies the very social constructivist nature of the discipline of Sociology as a whole and has become a fault line by which sociologists organize themselves both broadly across subfields and within subfields -- namely, those associated with race, ethnicity, and immigration.
My goal as a teacher is to expose students to a set of tools that will help them see structures at its most atomistic level. I challenge them to identify the countervailing social, cultural, political, and economic forces that hold together and are held together by institutionalized roles, norms, and processes. These are the institutional products and foundations that create the material and ideological elements that we recognize as ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms. I hold myself responsible for equipping students with the theoretical, substantive, and analytical knowledge that will allow them to drill down into to the basic structures that hold together big sociological concepts like 'income inequality', `mass incarceration', `cumulative disadvantage', and `health disparities'.
I do not tell my students what to think. Instead, I guide them in wrestling with the unease they encounter as they gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of how we know what we think we know about ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms. I offer them the tools they need to adjudicate the information for themselves.
As a profession that specializes in the study of social life, our usage of the term, `structure', is often taken for granted. The processes undergirding structures have become an implicit understandings about how the world naturally works. We export this concept of `structure' to every facet of social life -- from ideologies to actions and to organizations, even to our bodies -- failing many times to appreciate its complexities. As a teacher, my philosophy is to make plain the ways that structures of ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms get into the bodies, minds, and souls of people worldwide
The complexities of structure weighs heavily on the study of ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms. Innately structural systems, ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms are typically within the discipline treated as individual artifacts. Such individuation of a structural systems belies the very social constructivist nature of the discipline of Sociology as a whole and has become a fault line by which sociologists organize themselves both broadly across subfields and within subfields -- namely, those associated with race, ethnicity, and immigration.
My goal as a teacher is to expose students to a set of tools that will help them see structures at its most atomistic level. I challenge them to identify the countervailing social, cultural, political, and economic forces that hold together and are held together by institutionalized roles, norms, and processes. These are the institutional products and foundations that create the material and ideological elements that we recognize as ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms. I hold myself responsible for equipping students with the theoretical, substantive, and analytical knowledge that will allow them to drill down into to the basic structures that hold together big sociological concepts like 'income inequality', `mass incarceration', `cumulative disadvantage', and `health disparities'.
I do not tell my students what to think. Instead, I guide them in wrestling with the unease they encounter as they gain a deeper and more expansive understanding of how we know what we think we know about ethnoraciality and ethnoracisms. I offer them the tools they need to adjudicate the information for themselves.
Teaching Style
I begin all of my classes with a strong grounding in the theories that inform the broader topic. Then, I introduce them to substantive debates through the eyes of a variety of data sources that are commonly used by social scientists. Interspersed through these substantive dives, I ask my students to write -- critically and freestyle -- as a way to process the material they find most important and relevant and to identify the connective tissue among the substance provided. I walk them through writing a longer form essay on a dedicated topic through staged assignments, and I provide at least one exam that go along side smaller task-based quizzes.
In my upper-level undergraduate courses, I maintain the same basic structure, integrating more discussion. Courses are taught in a quasi-seminar style, where are lectures are used to provide a common knowledge base and language to guide discussion. I ask students to consider a set of research questions to be their guide for the semester. Distinctly so, I require students to play seriously with theory and/or data in a way that helps them understand how to discern the methods that are most appropriate for them to use to answer their research question. The deliverable here is a long-form manuscript that has the basics of a research paper.
All students who take graduate courses -- both undergraduate and graduate-level students -- take on a leadership responsibility in parsing course material. The basic structure is maintained from lower-level courses in the distilling of knowledge. However, I expect graduate students to assume a more authoritative sense of control over the material, as they are beginning the professionalization process of being knowledge-producers. I take a more debate style in graduate courses that generally reflects the key components of the Socratic method. Your job is to tell me what you think is important. Your peers' job is to critique both the evidence that you use to build your argument and the ideologies that govern how you infer meaning from the evidence. My job is to identify the hidden structure of your theoretical, methodological, substantive, and analytical ideas and to provide alternative ways of thinking about the sociological -- and specifically, structural -- imperatives that the general topic demands we consider.
In my upper-level undergraduate courses, I maintain the same basic structure, integrating more discussion. Courses are taught in a quasi-seminar style, where are lectures are used to provide a common knowledge base and language to guide discussion. I ask students to consider a set of research questions to be their guide for the semester. Distinctly so, I require students to play seriously with theory and/or data in a way that helps them understand how to discern the methods that are most appropriate for them to use to answer their research question. The deliverable here is a long-form manuscript that has the basics of a research paper.
All students who take graduate courses -- both undergraduate and graduate-level students -- take on a leadership responsibility in parsing course material. The basic structure is maintained from lower-level courses in the distilling of knowledge. However, I expect graduate students to assume a more authoritative sense of control over the material, as they are beginning the professionalization process of being knowledge-producers. I take a more debate style in graduate courses that generally reflects the key components of the Socratic method. Your job is to tell me what you think is important. Your peers' job is to critique both the evidence that you use to build your argument and the ideologies that govern how you infer meaning from the evidence. My job is to identify the hidden structure of your theoretical, methodological, substantive, and analytical ideas and to provide alternative ways of thinking about the sociological -- and specifically, structural -- imperatives that the general topic demands we consider.
Teaching Experience
Emory University, Department of Sociology, Atlanta, GA
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, Ann Arbor, MI
RWJF Center for Health Policy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
Indiana University, Department of Sociology, Bloomington, IN
Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
- Undergraduate
- Race and Ethnic Relations
- Ethnoraciality and Ethnoracisms: Introduction
- Ethnoraciality and Ethnoracisms: Advanced Topics
- Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
- Race and Policing
- Graduate
- Quantifying Race and Ethnicity
- Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities
- Theories of Race and Racism
- Ethnoraciality and Ethnoracisms
Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research, Ann Arbor, MI
- 2017: Co-Instructor, Health Disparities, Health Inequities, and Vulnerable Populations: Research Examining and Understanding Complexity
- 2012, 2013: Instructor, Methodological Issues in Quantitative Research on Race and Ethnicity
- 2010, 2011: Teaching Assistant to John Garcia, Methodological Issues in Quantitative Research on Race and Ethnicity
RWJF Center for Health Policy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM
- 2017: Co-Instructor, Quantitative Methods and Health Disparities
Indiana University, Department of Sociology, Bloomington, IN
- 2010: Instructor, Race and Ethnic Relations
- 2010: Instructor, Group Comparisons in Quantitative Research Methods: The Case of Race, Indiana Intensive Didactic Seminar
- 2008: Instructor, SAT Math Prep, Achievers Summer Academy
- 2006: Graduate Assistant to Bernice Pescosolido, Social Problems: Medical Sociology
Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
- 2010: Visiting Instructor, Race/Ethnicity and Science in Practice: A Course in Quantitative Research Methods