Courses Taught
Sociology of Disaster
Environmental Sociology
Quantitative Methods and Statistics
Introduction to Social Research Methods
Urban Sociology
The Sociological Imagination
Work Inequalities
Environmental Sociology
Quantitative Methods and Statistics
Introduction to Social Research Methods
Urban Sociology
The Sociological Imagination
Work Inequalities
Teaching Philosophy
While growing up in a working-class family in a factory town located within the U.S. “rust belt”, I was fascinated with inequalities. However, I recall being frustrated by my inability to articulately critique many of the things I saw happening around me; I lacked the concepts, language, and analytical framework to see my world sociologically and to give voice to my concerns. Years later, the field of sociology gave me the lens and voice that I needed. Teaching provides me with a way of helping students translate their own biographies into research interests and testable hypotheses. My goal in teaching sociology is to encourage students to be engaged, critical, analytic observers of the world around them. I was initially drawn to sociology by its unique perspective on structural inequality, and I hope to help students understand the ways their own lives have been, and continue to be, shaped by systematic inequalities. At the same time, I hope to help students develop crucial research and analytic skills, writing skills, and debate skills. As I discuss below, I do this through an approach that is: participatory, critical, scholarly, reflective, experiential, service-oriented, and geared toward social change.
1. In the classroom, my teaching takes an interactive, Socratic approach. I often take a low-tech approach, instead requiring students to answer questions and discuss the assigned course material. Rather than lecture, I ask successive questions of students—some designed for recall (to ensure they have done the assigned reading) and some calibrated for a deeper level of analysis, contemplation, and application of the material to new situations or problems. I find that this approach elicits a high level of student participation (noted in my peer evaluations of teaching) and student accountability. In teaching research methodology courses, I hope to provide students with the concepts, methodological tools, and theoretical frameworks necessary to develop, clarify, and ask their own sociological questions. As an example, students in my “Introduction to Research Methods” course craft their own research questions and, through the course of the semester, use a number of different methods in an attempt to find answers to these questions. Some of these exercises include research design, sampling, survey research, quantitative analysis, interviewing, qualitative analysis, content analysis, and discourse analysis. I also hope that by the end of the course, students will understand the possible uses and the critiques of all of these methods, and that they will be able to consider the assumptions and epistemological frameworks inherent in each. Furthermore, as I realize that not every student I teach will ultimately become a sociologist, I hope to also encourage development of skills that have real world applications for everyone, regardless of intended career path. These skills include writing, speaking, data analysis, and critical thinking skills. Therefore, each class activity, test, and assignment I design is tailored to develop one or more of these skills. In my “Urban Sociology” course, I likewise ask students to spend time observing an urban neighbourhood in Calgary, connecting built environment and social interactions that they witness to course theories (political/economic or social constructionist theories of the city, for example). This experience observing and collecting data on-the-ground helps students to connect abstract ideas to their concrete surroundings.
2. I also take explicit steps to ensure that my teaching is critical, and actively interrogates sources of power and inequality. Early in my career, I strove to be apolitical, as I had long been told that students should not even know my own political views. As I have matured as a teacher, I no longer strive to be apolitical. I now take my approach from critical pedagogy, which seeks to sensitize students to inequalities of which they may not otherwise be aware, and to critically discuss avenues for change and sources of complacency. In this approach, I am moved Howard Zinn’s observation that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” In other words, in a world with economic and political systems continually generating higher levels of inequality, environmental racism, disaster risk, and other social problems, taking a neutral stance on these issues does little to foster equality or social justice. I am also moved by the words of Brazilian educator Paolo Friere, who wrote “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” This approach means that in my classroom, we cover environmental justice and environmental racism by critically discussing the poisoning of Fort Chipewyan by upstream oil and gas work, as well as the sources of complacency that allow the Flint water crisis to continue. Whereas in the past, I may have shied away from these “sensitive” topics, or presented them in an “neutral” standpoint, I now realize that the lives of people killed or maimed by the power of neoliberal capitalism are simply too important to ignore. I have also worked to share my approach to teaching with MRU colleagues. I participated in an ADC Faculty Learning Community on critical pedagogy, and have presented to the MRFA about it at their annual retreat.
3. Students find that my approach to teaching is both scholarly and collaborative. I hold high expectations for student work, and continually reinforce that their written work should be (and is!) publication-quality. When they complete final papers or reports, I encourage them to submit to various paper competitions. Indeed, two students have won the Student Paper Competition held annual by the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. Twice I have asked students in my Sociology of Disaster course to prepare reports for the Calgary Emergency Management Agency. They have also presented these reports to city staff at the Emergency Operations Center. These reports are professional quality and help my students to have an impact on the way that we play for disasters, and I could not be prouder of that.
My approach is also collaborative in that I actively work to coauthor papers with students, as I believe that undergraduate students are capable of publication-quality work that makes an impact. I treat students as emerging colleagues and work to train highly-qualified persons. To date, I have coauthored three published or accepted articles with students, with one more under review and another in development. I am hopeful that this experience will help to launch their careers and will give them tremendous confidence in their abilities. I have also supervised more than 20 student research assistants, and I consider supervising and mentoring these RA’s to be a core part of my approach to teaching.
4. My approach to teaching is always reflective and iterative, as I believe that good teaching is created through hard work and trial-and-error; it is not an innate skill. I continually study and evaluate my classroom exercise and assignments (evidenced by my articles in Teaching Sociologyand in the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), and seek to be a leader in the development of innovative teaching methods. I also frequently update my syllabi, lectures, and readings in response to feedback from students and colleagues. Because my field is dynamic, the university is growing, and students are changing, I hope to place myself at the leading edge of innovative teaching methods. My student-centered focus was rewarded through my receipt of the 2012 "Champion Award" from the Student’s Association of Mount Royal University.
5. My courses expose students to sociological phenomena happening in the world; they are experiential in nature. Whenever possible, I ensure that my teaching taps into the epistemic chasm between knowledge(which can be formed through reading books or listening to lectures) and knowing(which can only, in my view, be honed through experiencing). In both 2014 and 2015, I co-organized trips for my entire class to visit High River, Alberta, which was catastrophically flooded in 2013. They met with local officials, toured the town, and learned about the ongoing recovery. Similarly, I have had students do ethnographic studies of neighbourhoods, and have had students in my research methods courses conduct four small, original research projects. Perhaps most germane to this approach is my Field School course which has twice taken students to New Orleans. Students in the course reflected upon how learning about a disaster from a textbook is fundamentally different from setting foot in the Lower 9thWard and experiencing the abandoned homes, slow recovery, dereliction, and poverty first-hand. My students travel to Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana and meet with people who have been affected and sickened by the BP Oil Spill. While reading about it in a textbook may help them ask sociological questions (and there is real value in that), experiencing a disaster recovery—to the extent it can be called that—often evokes emotions such as anger. These emotional and fundamentally human responses often motivate action and a desire for change in ways that far removed, detached, and objective approaches to teaching and learning never can.
6. Recently, I have begun engaging students in service-learning, as well. I do so because I believe that learning should be active and engaged, rather than passive. As one pertinent example, I engage my Environmental Sociology class in both service-learning projects with local environmental organizations and consciousness-raising projects where they are generating awareness within the general public about environmental issues that are important to them. One more pertinent example involves my Field School in Sociology course, which took students to New Orleans to learn about disaster resilience and recovery. While there, students partnered with a local non-profit to collect data and help to author a report on the recovery of small, locally owned businesses from Katrina. They also spent time building homes in flood-ravaged neighbourhoods with both the Lower 9thWard Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development and also with Habitat for Humanity. This experience, I believe, provided students with opportunities to both learn and serve that they will remember for many years.
7. Lastly, my teaching is geared toward facilitating social change. Through my teaching I hope to convey to students that a university education brings with it tremendous responsibility. Though the degree will surely augment their potential earnings, education should not be mere job training. It must also open their eyes to fundamental ethical debates and should sensitize them to issues of human rights and social justice. In that sense, I hope to foster in them a sense of responsibility and the earnest desire to make the world a qualitatively better place for human societies.
While growing up in a working-class family in a factory town located within the U.S. “rust belt”, I was fascinated with inequalities. However, I recall being frustrated by my inability to articulately critique many of the things I saw happening around me; I lacked the concepts, language, and analytical framework to see my world sociologically and to give voice to my concerns. Years later, the field of sociology gave me the lens and voice that I needed. Teaching provides me with a way of helping students translate their own biographies into research interests and testable hypotheses. My goal in teaching sociology is to encourage students to be engaged, critical, analytic observers of the world around them. I was initially drawn to sociology by its unique perspective on structural inequality, and I hope to help students understand the ways their own lives have been, and continue to be, shaped by systematic inequalities. At the same time, I hope to help students develop crucial research and analytic skills, writing skills, and debate skills. As I discuss below, I do this through an approach that is: participatory, critical, scholarly, reflective, experiential, service-oriented, and geared toward social change.
1. In the classroom, my teaching takes an interactive, Socratic approach. I often take a low-tech approach, instead requiring students to answer questions and discuss the assigned course material. Rather than lecture, I ask successive questions of students—some designed for recall (to ensure they have done the assigned reading) and some calibrated for a deeper level of analysis, contemplation, and application of the material to new situations or problems. I find that this approach elicits a high level of student participation (noted in my peer evaluations of teaching) and student accountability. In teaching research methodology courses, I hope to provide students with the concepts, methodological tools, and theoretical frameworks necessary to develop, clarify, and ask their own sociological questions. As an example, students in my “Introduction to Research Methods” course craft their own research questions and, through the course of the semester, use a number of different methods in an attempt to find answers to these questions. Some of these exercises include research design, sampling, survey research, quantitative analysis, interviewing, qualitative analysis, content analysis, and discourse analysis. I also hope that by the end of the course, students will understand the possible uses and the critiques of all of these methods, and that they will be able to consider the assumptions and epistemological frameworks inherent in each. Furthermore, as I realize that not every student I teach will ultimately become a sociologist, I hope to also encourage development of skills that have real world applications for everyone, regardless of intended career path. These skills include writing, speaking, data analysis, and critical thinking skills. Therefore, each class activity, test, and assignment I design is tailored to develop one or more of these skills. In my “Urban Sociology” course, I likewise ask students to spend time observing an urban neighbourhood in Calgary, connecting built environment and social interactions that they witness to course theories (political/economic or social constructionist theories of the city, for example). This experience observing and collecting data on-the-ground helps students to connect abstract ideas to their concrete surroundings.
2. I also take explicit steps to ensure that my teaching is critical, and actively interrogates sources of power and inequality. Early in my career, I strove to be apolitical, as I had long been told that students should not even know my own political views. As I have matured as a teacher, I no longer strive to be apolitical. I now take my approach from critical pedagogy, which seeks to sensitize students to inequalities of which they may not otherwise be aware, and to critically discuss avenues for change and sources of complacency. In this approach, I am moved Howard Zinn’s observation that “you can’t be neutral on a moving train.” In other words, in a world with economic and political systems continually generating higher levels of inequality, environmental racism, disaster risk, and other social problems, taking a neutral stance on these issues does little to foster equality or social justice. I am also moved by the words of Brazilian educator Paolo Friere, who wrote “Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.” This approach means that in my classroom, we cover environmental justice and environmental racism by critically discussing the poisoning of Fort Chipewyan by upstream oil and gas work, as well as the sources of complacency that allow the Flint water crisis to continue. Whereas in the past, I may have shied away from these “sensitive” topics, or presented them in an “neutral” standpoint, I now realize that the lives of people killed or maimed by the power of neoliberal capitalism are simply too important to ignore. I have also worked to share my approach to teaching with MRU colleagues. I participated in an ADC Faculty Learning Community on critical pedagogy, and have presented to the MRFA about it at their annual retreat.
3. Students find that my approach to teaching is both scholarly and collaborative. I hold high expectations for student work, and continually reinforce that their written work should be (and is!) publication-quality. When they complete final papers or reports, I encourage them to submit to various paper competitions. Indeed, two students have won the Student Paper Competition held annual by the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado. Twice I have asked students in my Sociology of Disaster course to prepare reports for the Calgary Emergency Management Agency. They have also presented these reports to city staff at the Emergency Operations Center. These reports are professional quality and help my students to have an impact on the way that we play for disasters, and I could not be prouder of that.
My approach is also collaborative in that I actively work to coauthor papers with students, as I believe that undergraduate students are capable of publication-quality work that makes an impact. I treat students as emerging colleagues and work to train highly-qualified persons. To date, I have coauthored three published or accepted articles with students, with one more under review and another in development. I am hopeful that this experience will help to launch their careers and will give them tremendous confidence in their abilities. I have also supervised more than 20 student research assistants, and I consider supervising and mentoring these RA’s to be a core part of my approach to teaching.
4. My approach to teaching is always reflective and iterative, as I believe that good teaching is created through hard work and trial-and-error; it is not an innate skill. I continually study and evaluate my classroom exercise and assignments (evidenced by my articles in Teaching Sociologyand in the Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning), and seek to be a leader in the development of innovative teaching methods. I also frequently update my syllabi, lectures, and readings in response to feedback from students and colleagues. Because my field is dynamic, the university is growing, and students are changing, I hope to place myself at the leading edge of innovative teaching methods. My student-centered focus was rewarded through my receipt of the 2012 "Champion Award" from the Student’s Association of Mount Royal University.
5. My courses expose students to sociological phenomena happening in the world; they are experiential in nature. Whenever possible, I ensure that my teaching taps into the epistemic chasm between knowledge(which can be formed through reading books or listening to lectures) and knowing(which can only, in my view, be honed through experiencing). In both 2014 and 2015, I co-organized trips for my entire class to visit High River, Alberta, which was catastrophically flooded in 2013. They met with local officials, toured the town, and learned about the ongoing recovery. Similarly, I have had students do ethnographic studies of neighbourhoods, and have had students in my research methods courses conduct four small, original research projects. Perhaps most germane to this approach is my Field School course which has twice taken students to New Orleans. Students in the course reflected upon how learning about a disaster from a textbook is fundamentally different from setting foot in the Lower 9thWard and experiencing the abandoned homes, slow recovery, dereliction, and poverty first-hand. My students travel to Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana and meet with people who have been affected and sickened by the BP Oil Spill. While reading about it in a textbook may help them ask sociological questions (and there is real value in that), experiencing a disaster recovery—to the extent it can be called that—often evokes emotions such as anger. These emotional and fundamentally human responses often motivate action and a desire for change in ways that far removed, detached, and objective approaches to teaching and learning never can.
6. Recently, I have begun engaging students in service-learning, as well. I do so because I believe that learning should be active and engaged, rather than passive. As one pertinent example, I engage my Environmental Sociology class in both service-learning projects with local environmental organizations and consciousness-raising projects where they are generating awareness within the general public about environmental issues that are important to them. One more pertinent example involves my Field School in Sociology course, which took students to New Orleans to learn about disaster resilience and recovery. While there, students partnered with a local non-profit to collect data and help to author a report on the recovery of small, locally owned businesses from Katrina. They also spent time building homes in flood-ravaged neighbourhoods with both the Lower 9thWard Center for Sustainable Engagement and Development and also with Habitat for Humanity. This experience, I believe, provided students with opportunities to both learn and serve that they will remember for many years.
7. Lastly, my teaching is geared toward facilitating social change. Through my teaching I hope to convey to students that a university education brings with it tremendous responsibility. Though the degree will surely augment their potential earnings, education should not be mere job training. It must also open their eyes to fundamental ethical debates and should sensitize them to issues of human rights and social justice. In that sense, I hope to foster in them a sense of responsibility and the earnest desire to make the world a qualitatively better place for human societies.
Disaster Field School to New Orleans
The sociology field school is a combined experiential-learning and service-learning project, which takes a class of students from Mount Royal University to southern Louisiana to learn about ongoing recovery efforts from both Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.
Every two years, we travel to New Orleans and immerse ourselves in the city. While there, where we have partnered with, learned from, and served multiple organizations including the Lower 9th Ward Centre for Sustainable Engagement and Development, Habitat for Humanity, the City of New Orleans, the Urban Conservancy, and several local universities. We have designed and carried out surveys, written reports, and importantly, helped to build homes in flood-devastated neighbourhoods. We've also visited and learned from families in southern Louisiana impacted by the BP oil spill. Students are also afforded the opportunity to experience the incredible cuisine, culture, architecture, and people of the region.
Every two years, we travel to New Orleans and immerse ourselves in the city. While there, where we have partnered with, learned from, and served multiple organizations including the Lower 9th Ward Centre for Sustainable Engagement and Development, Habitat for Humanity, the City of New Orleans, the Urban Conservancy, and several local universities. We have designed and carried out surveys, written reports, and importantly, helped to build homes in flood-devastated neighbourhoods. We've also visited and learned from families in southern Louisiana impacted by the BP oil spill. Students are also afforded the opportunity to experience the incredible cuisine, culture, architecture, and people of the region.
