Teaching and Pedagogy
courses for SPRING 2024:
public opinion & political behavior
congress
Introduction to American politics
courses for fall 2023:
introduction to american politics (online)
Courses Previously Taught
Introduction to American Politics
Rollins college, Department of Politics
Last offered FALL 2022
This course offers an introduction to the national institutions and political processes of American government and democratic representation. Topics include the Constitution, the American political tradition, public opinion, interest groups and social movements, political institutions, civil rights, civil liberties, and matters of public policy. Students develop a deeper understanding of the Presidency, Congress, and Courts. They develop a toolkit for analyzing and evaluating the activities of the American government. Along the way, they grapple with the contours and challenges of American democracy.
introduction to Quantitative methods
Rollins college, Department of Politics
Last offered spring 2022
This course equips students to tell compelling stories about the political and social world using quantitative data. Whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably already engaged in social and political storytelling. Simply observing the world around you and ascribing meaning to what you see is a form of storytelling. Analyzing quantitative data is a more rigorous version of this same process. Quantitative data allows you to transcend your personal observations and explore what you cannot readily see. The ultimate goal of this class is not to turn you into a statistician — it is to empower you as a convincing, empirically-grounded storyteller.
Survey methods
Rollins college, Department of Politics
Last offered fall 2022
This class partners students with a local non-profit to create, launch, and analyze a survey. Using the survey data they collect, students analyze the results to develop and present policy recommendations. This is an intensive, hands-on course that requires students to perform advanced statistical analyses.
Gender Politics
Rollins college, Department of Politics
Last offered spring 2022
Gender is a complicated social construct. It defines the interpersonal roles we play, the social structures that connect us, and the lens through which we perceive ourselves and others. And it enters politics in countless — though not always easily detectable — ways. The purpose of this class to explore the role of gender in American politics. Why do women continue to hold fewer positions of political power than men? Do male and female voters want the same things? Do men and women in office govern differently? Does the system as it currently exists offer equitable political representation for all genders? This course will explore this and other critical questions related to gender issues in American politics.
Telling a Big Lie (Rollins College Conference Course)
Rollins college, Department of Politics
Last offered fall 2021
Lying has been getting a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. Lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories therefore pose a serious threat to the political stability of our nation. How do you protect yourself from being duped? Well, there is an old adage: you can’t con a con. In this course, you will tell a “big lie.” Specifically, you will invent a convincing political lie and develop a plan for spreading it on a mass scale. To prepare you for this task, you will explore the sociology of lying, the psychology of misinformation, what motivates political lies, and the downstream social and political consequences of disinformation. You will also practice identifying the key features of big lies, assessing what makes them convincing, and describing how they spread.
Politics of Mass Media
Rollins college, Department of Politics
Last offered Spring 2021
This course explores the functions of the media in American politics writ large. Students grapple with big-picture questions that don’t always have clear or easy answers: What is the proper role of media in a democracy? How does media affect Americans’ political attitudes and behaviors? Is the media biased? How does the media shape the behavior of elected officials? To address these and other questions, the class draws on interdisciplinary research from communication theory, psychology, sociology, and political science. Students are encouraged to assess the benefits, limitations, and pathologies of America’s changing media landscape.
Political Psychology
Rollins college, Department of Politics
Last offered Fall 2020
This course explores what psychology can tell us about political phenomenon. Rather than examining what happened (e.g. who won an election) or how it happened (e.g. who turned out to vote), it considers why it happened by focusing on the psychology of political actors. For instance, how do people incorporate new political information into their decision-making? How does belonging to a social group shape individual political preferences? What role does emotion play in political behavior? As students work to answer these and other questions, they actively connect them to current political events. The class also considers how political psychologists generate knowledge through the development of hypotheses, experimental testing, survey research, and empirical analyses.
Introduction to American Politics (Masters level)
New York University, Wilf Family Department of Politics
Offered fall 2017
This course offers a broad survey of the key features of American politics. It is organized into four parts: In the first part of the course, students examine American political development, thought, and culture. In the second part, they learn about political institutions, including the courts, Congress, the presidency, and the bureaucracy. In the third part, the focus shifts to American political behavior, public opinion, interest groups, and the media. The final weeks of the course focus on current issues and topics in American politics. Along the way, students identify and evaluate the contours and challenges of American democracy. The course is conducted as a seminar. Class meetings give students an opportunity to practice their analytical skills and improve their comprehension of the material.
Identity Politics (Masters level)
New York University, Wilf Family Department of Politics
Offered Spring 2018
What explains the meteoric shift in favor of same-sex marriage in recent years? Why are there so few women in politics? Why do so many white Americans have such a viscerally negative reaction to minority activist groups, such as Black Lives Matter? This course brings together multiple approaches to the study of group identities – gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and others – to explore their role in contemporary American politics. The first part of this course introduces social identity theory and the psychology of group membership. The second portion of the course considers how major identities influence political and social behavior. The final portion of the course examines how these identities can overlap or collide to shape political discourse, attitude formation, structural inequalities, and policy outcomes. Along the way, it grapples with important normative debates about equality, power, and multiculturalism in American democracy. The course takes a hybrid format that combines lecture with seminar style discussion. For the final project, students produce an empirical recommendation report for a relevant identity-based political issue of their choice.
Other Pedagogical Activities
McGraw Graduate Teaching Fellow
Princeton University, 2016-2018
Graduate teaching fellows work closely with the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning to support graduate student instructors through effective training, classroom observation, and pedagogical workshops. Graduate teaching fellows have a record that demonstrates a passion for teaching, a desire to help new teachers, and experience with research-based teaching strategies. They must be committed to promoting active learning and inclusivity in the classroom.
Course development for "Policymaking in America"
Princeton University, Department of Politics
Offered by Dr. Charles Cameron, 2016
Multiple innovations were made to establish "Policy Making in America" as a "flipped classroom." I recorded two “flipped” lectures that moved course material on-line and developed new interactive mini-case studies and problem sets to replace those in-classroom lectures. Discussion sections were modified to incorporate active exercises to develop specific student skills, and on-line material was created to support the precept-based skill exercises. Finally, the evaluation of student performance was revamped using on-line tools.
McGraw Teaching Transcript Recipient
Princeton University, 2016
The Teaching Transcript Program provides Princeton graduate students and postdoctoral researchers opportunities to develop as self-reflective teachers who identify what they want their students to learn and then create strategies to promote and assess that learning. The program includes workshops on a wide range of issues related to teaching and academic careers, lunchtime discussions with faculty who are distinguished teachers, and a teaching observation. It culminates with the preparation of an original course syllabus and a statement of teaching philosophy.
McGraw Teaching Seminar Participant
Princeton University, 2015-2016
This selective, year-long workshop engages in critical discussions of current scholarship in the fields of learning and pedagogy, with opportunities for participants to apply new pedagogical approaches in their own teaching. Participants refine their understanding of teaching as they reflect meaningfully on the approaches and skills gained in their own disciplines as part of a liberal arts education.